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HE WORLD'S PRAYER 



Revelatio Revelata) 



]L. P. GRATACAP, A.M 





Class _IES.ICi^: 

Book_J^iria. 
Copyriglrt)!" 



COraRIGHT DEPOSIK 



REVELATIO REVELATA 
THE SUPREME TEST 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

(Revelatio Revelatd) 



? .J By 



L. P. GRATACAP, A.M. 

Author of 

"The Philosophy of Ritual," "The Analytics of a Belief 

IN A Future Life," "The World as Intention," 

"The Substance of Literature" 






itiAM«P^tf'**^^"%fc 



New York 

Thomas Benton 

1915 



-t"- 



Copyright, 1915 

By 

L. P. Gratacap 



r 

THE EDDY PRESS CORPORATION 
CUMBERLAND, MARYLAND 



©CI.A401302 

JUN -9 1915 



Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? Shall the 
dead arise and praise thee ? Selah. 

Shall thy loving kindness he declared in the 
grave ? Or thy faithfulness in destruction ? 

Shall thy wonders he known in the dark ? And 
thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness ? 

—PSALM LXXXVIII 



I cannot understand either the frame of mind that shrinks from extinction, 
nor that which professes to anticipate and believe in it. I should not be sur- 
prised if after all the Egyptians were right, and the death of a man were the 
birth of a soul. But (like my namesake, Joey) I wants to know: and suppos- 
ing this to be the case, are we always to live on under a burden of old griefs 
constantly accumulating at compound interest, for ever? Or will a time 
come when the onrush of some inconceivable Dawn will brush aside the cob- 
webs of the unsatisfactory past — even the pleasures Memory has turned into 
pain — and put the shocking old house in order for an interminable Day? 

— Joseph Vance. 

Will my tiny spark of being 

Wholly vanish in your deeps and lights? 

Must my day be dark by reason, 

O ye Heavens, of your boundless nights, 

Rush of Sun and roll of systems. 

And your fiery clash of meteorites? 

— Tennyson. 

For in this earthly frame 
Our's is the reptile lot, much toil, much blame. 
Manifold motions making little speed, 
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed. 

— Wordsworth. 

Could we but know 
The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel. 

Where lie those happier rills and meadows low — 
Ah, if beyond the spirit's inmost cavil. 

Aught of that country could we surely know. 
Who would not go? 

Might we but hear 
The hovering angels' high imagined chorus. 

Or catch, betimes, with wakeful eyes and clear, 
One radiant vista of the realm before us — 

Ah, who would fear? 

Were we quite sure 
To find the peerless friend who left us lonely. 
Or, there by some celestial stream as pure. 
To gaze in eyes that here were lovelit only. 
This weary, mortal coil, were we quite sure. 
Who would endure? -Stedman. 



It is a miserable thing for a question of truth to be confined to mere presump- 
tion and counter-presumption, with no decisive thunderbolt of fact to clear 
the baffling darkness. — Wm. James. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Our Predicament 15 

11. A Silent or a Speaking God 41 

III. A Silent or a Speaking God {Continued) . 71 

IV. The Plan 100 

V. The Plan {Continued) 120 

VI. The Two Revelations 144 

VII. The Church 172 

VIII. The Answer 201 

IX. The Alternative 221 

X. Conclusion 248 



PREFACE 

There are moments in life when a sense of dreary aim- 
lessness overwhelms our incessant activities and duties, 
and momentarily halts them. It is absolutely neces- 
sary to feel a goal of achievement ahead of us, and the 
permanency of individual progress, in order to animate 
our attention and preserve our zeal. A thousand 
things can form such a goal, and they are none the less 
useful as incentives, if they limit each day with only its 
round of domestic or business duties, so that each day, 
as a unit of performance, brings the satiety of satisfac- 
tion in work well done. But we in philosophic mo- 
ments, especially if endowed with some liberality of 
thought, crave a larger outlook and a deeper stimulus. 
That can really only come in the fullest sense from a 
realization of a cosmic meaning in the world's move- 
ment, some end referable to the excellence or success of 
our own conduct. It means a God and a Future Life, 
or it means a terrestrial procession forward to an ulti- 
mate perfectibility, in which if we are not participants 
we have, for it, been calculable agents, through our 
present justice or industry, or faithfulness or wisdom. 

But is it not possible for us to increase our certainty 
as to this, not by the futility of argument and discus- 
sion, but by an appeal, a deliberate discriminating and 
universal appeal to the power which Christians assume 
to be God, and to draw from the results of such a critical 



10 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

test the divergent conclusions which the results — 
positive or negative — authorize? I will not anticipate 
the argument here used in the following pages, to give 
plausibility, or more reverently, earnestness and reason- 
ableness to this experiment, but I beg for an instant, 
the reader's attention to the congruity of the attempt, 
and its legitimate harmony with all other methods of 
ascertaining truth. 

Experiment is the crucial test of theory, it is the key 
to the unknown, it is the only conceivable step to be 
taken when a new vista is to be opened in nature, or an 
entrance is to be effected upon ascending stages of 
corroborative discovery. Can we not extend the use 
of this munificent instrument of investigation to the 
religious areas of our life, especially as we are supposed 
to have — according to Christian profession, and the 
book herein following is based upon Christian claims — 
a direct access to the mysterious realms of power which 
underly or are superimposed upon the visible universe? 

Objections to such a Plan are discussed in the pages 
of the book itself, and it is only here insisted that it is 
not a presumptuous suggestion, that its usefulness is 
directly enforced by all the evidence about us in science, 
and that we should not hesitate to utilize this beneficent 
procedure in religion, or in religious subjects. If w^e 
can sincerely believe, it may yield us practical results. 
What is an experiment? Obviously the artificial 
juncture of artificial conditions in a process of inter- 
rogating nature as to her laws arid the substance of her 
phenomena. Or else experiment consists in adopting 
a procedure or a course of conduct, which it is expected 
may produce desirable effects. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 11 

Thus Moissan in his studies on the origin of the 
diamond through conditions made possible by the 
electric furnace secured results, which if not exactly 
repeated in nature, did definitely throw light upon 
possible phases of its formation. The crumpled layers 
of cloth which Sir James Hall produced by a weight 
upon and compression from the sides of, sheets of hori- 
zontal cloth, revealed forces at work in the folding and 
plication of the stratified rocks of the earth's surface. 
One of the greatest triumphs of modern chemistry was 
the production of artificial alizarine which has dis- 
placed the natural madder. It was by a long series of 
experiments that finally in 1869 Graebe and Lieberman 
accomplished this, leading to the utilization of the 
anthracene of the coal tar products, for the manufacture 
of the brilliant madder dye. These experiments were 
of the interrogatory sort. 

The hypothesis that experiment can be introduced 
into the religious field is not preposterous, and it might 
have amazing and stupendous consequences. Or it 
might not. Here again we, in this last case, would 
opportunely learn something. Experiments accurately 
made are the test of truth. They must always confirm 
the letter of authority, or if they do not, we are brought 
to the edge of a new wisdom. Indeed we are not al- 
ways over anxious that they will justify our expecta- 
tions and forecasts. Now as a fact experimentation 
enters in a very grandiose and exacting way into re- 
ligious experiences or religious calculations. It is 
nothing less than the living of a correct life, by numbers 
who, relying on the assertions of their spiritual guides. 



12 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

expect the fruition in another life of the bliss promised 
to faith and obedience in this one. This can scarcely 
be questioned, for it is a matter of confession with 
many, and of a confession made reverently, with a very 
composed sense of the seriousness of the admission. It 
was the experiment that the great Pascal so conclusively 
urged, and an experiment that no one, it seems to me, 
need to feel ashamed of. Religious lives are led on 
higher grounds of impulse than experiment, to be sure, 
but the experimentalists should suffer no embarrass- 
ment from the contempt of their superior companions. 
They have every reason to believe their moderation 
should receive some reward. Their experiment belongs 
to the second class mentioned above, those of demon- 
strative trial. We have suggested an experiment in 
this book which at least we aver merits attention, and 
should not lightly be ignored because it is an experi- 
ment, or might be called such. The association of the 
word experiment with a religious question may sound 
disagreeable, and convey the impression of a cool, 
calculating, observant and narrowly inquisitive, and 
purely secular spirit, quite emotionless, and perhaps a 
little cynical. 

But in the experiment here considered such an im- 
pression is utterly false. We urge that it is to be 
undertaken in the religious spirit and on religious 
grounds. It certainly could be made on no other. 
There is an appropriate mental atmosphere, so to speak, 
and an attitude unquestionably appropriate, for scien- 
tific experiment, and an experimenter entering upon a 
series of physico-chemical experiments is intellectually 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 13 

observant, and not emotionally hopeful, or aesthetically 
elated, although, as has often been shown, he may be 
laboring under some excitement. The psychological 
temper of a religious experiment would be quite differ- 
ent, and it might be thought quite without analogy, 
inasmuch as we think of experiment and experimenta- 
tion as solely in the purview of the natural sciences. 

But there have been experiments in other fields 
sensibly colored with the emotional glow, the flushed 
ardor of hope, the intenser currents of the heart's love, 
and they have been in the fields of art and of music. 
I think what I am in search of has taken place among 
innovators in painting, perhaps with men like Turner, 
and in music with Wagners who struggled to incorporate 
in music the fibre and the expression of nature and of 
man. To start a new style in art, to reach out for 
effects in a spirit of earnest, conscientious heartiness 
and thrilled expectancy, brings more nearly in view the 
kind of temper involved in the experiments we are 
pleading for. It is clearly contrasted with the imper- 
turbable and keen scrutiny of a biologist or a physician ; 
it becomes saturated with the nervous energies of hope 
and affection; it draws upon the deepest springs of 
feeling and it is accompanied by a bending of the whole 
soul towards its object, so that the blended streams of 
emotion and mind pour their contents of humour, 
sensation, sympathy, experience, thought and fancy, 
into the mould of the artist's or composer's creative 
imagination, and something new and splendid is 
brought to the light of day, and to the appreciation of 
men and women. 



14 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

The experiment outlined in this book is meant to be 
no cold and chilled interrogation, but a throbbing 
supplication that the silence around us be somehow 
broken, and we shall be permitted again to hear the 
voice of God — or — that there shall still be silence. 
We may, we do call it an experiment — and perhaps so 
it is — but it is one gathering in its execution the summed 
up hopes of men, and crowds all their passionate curios- 
ity into an act of sublime expostulation and entreaty. 
The age and the hour are propitious for its geographic 
universality. Commerce and communication have 
gathered all the nations of the earth at the threshold of 
the Future, and they are waiting. Can they not by a 
prolonged and unanimous invocation fetch to this 
darkened and rambling earth a fresh assurance — or — 
rising from the sterility of their sublime effort, plunge 
into new economies and new philosophies? 



CHAPTER I 
Our Predicament 

The only puzzled creature on the surface of our rolling 
globe is man. He alone is at odds with his condition, 
his environment, his functions; and his puzzle only 
reaches any kind of analytical value, so far as language 
can express it, after he has parted with his aboriginal 
forebears and begun to expect better things. 

The universe grows in strangeness and puts on the 
habiliments of an incongruous or maddening disarray, 
as the mind of man attains ideals of a formal order, 
either in logic or justice, which are hopelessly at variance 
with a haphazard and an unjust world. But yet more sig- 
nificantly his complaints centre in himself, and his vision 
disordered by his own disabilities or trials communicates 
perhaps a deceptive crookedness to the outside order. 

As an Indian or any other kind of wild man he had no 
contentions, no grumblings, no mutiny. He was born 
amid surroundings of which he seemed as naturally a 
part as the game of the mountains he hunted, or the 
roots of medicinal plants he tore from the ground. 
His mind involved in no other quest, felt no harsh dis- 
cord between its postulates or requests and the dancing 
retinue of physical phenomena about him which formed 
his world, or if these at moments, in more speculative 
individuals, turned up with inconsequent urgency, they 
never engendered much else than a stifled wonder. 



16 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

Their possessor, raised for a moment above the monot- 
onous or unruffled acquiescence of its fellows, soon fell 
back into the apathy of assent, and could never for a 
long time, and never clearly, explain his misgivings or 
distinguish his motives. 

The wild man's moods, his contentment, or his un- 
ruffled fusion with his surroundings, and his calm 
patience with his life is perfectly reflected in the brute 
creatures that accompany him in his work. The dog or 
the sheep, the horse, oxen, cat, cow, move unreflectingly 
in the expanse of prairie, or on the mountain slope, in 
unquestioning and unrepining obedience to instinct or 
habit. In few instances do they possess enough queru- 
lous rationality to resent ill treatment. No summons 
to rebellion, no matter what extremes of extinction or 
what vagaries of suflPering afflict them, receives any 
encouragement in the tread mill accuracy of repetition 
in the animal life. 

The whole animated world — and man as an ab- 
original belongs to it — is inured to the spectacle of its 
own misery, or at any rate makes no deductions from 
its happiness in living, because of pain and deprivation. 
Every animal does elicit from living a measurable 
amount of happiness — a preponderant amount — but it 
would be a most histrionic moment in zoological events 
if the woodchuck demonstrably railed at fate because 
he did not have wings to migrate to sanitary and 
warmer latitudes when the winter seals him in his hole. 

It is only as a creature, possessed with reason, begins 
to consider his condition, if an unhappy one, as a conse- 
quence of no actions of his own, and his resentment 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 17 

gains reinforcement from an inspection of innumerable 
similar states, that he impugns the scheme of creation, 
and employs himself in finding reasons for it, or less 
sensibly engages in its denunciation. Our condition as 
portrayed by James Fitzjames Stephen (Essays by a 
Barrister), even under circumstances of material com- 
fort are not calculated to allay discontent. He says, 
"take then one reasonably prosperous person and see 
whether he is in an entirely satisfactory condition. It 
is clear that he is not. He neither knows whence he 
comes nor whither he is going, nor for what purpose he 
lives: at least his knowledge upon these subjects is 
indefinite, so much involved in metaphors and 
mysteries, that it is little more than enough to make 
visible the darkness in which he stands." 

If then such reflections afflict the peace of mind of an 
average well-to-do man, probably enjoying the com- 
monplace ameliorations of life, how much more poig- 
nantly do they disturb those who suffer many 
physical deprivations, or those endowed with acute 
sensibilities, who discover the wide gulf of separation 
between realities and ideals. To the struggling 
worker the world is a hard place to live in, to the 
questioning philosopher it is a hard world to believe in. 
The latter, to be sure, is not unwilling to offer a way to 
believe in it, or a plan by which to confer upon it a 
rational simplicity, and, as a matter of fact, he is better 
off in a world which seems to need just this theoretical 
interpretation. But his very activity, the bare fact of 
the philosopher at all is a clean and eloquent advertise- 
ment of the world's, at least, apparent confusion. He 



18 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

IS needed for no other purpose than to explain its prob- 
lems and enact for it a mental scheme which would 
make it comprehensible. And there have been many 
such schemes, and that they contradict each other, 
that the world is divided in its allegiance to their 
dicta, that inscrutable and indefatigable apologists are 
constantly on their feet and in arms to defend their 
numerous claims, their isms and their logic, their con- 
tentions and their subtentions, in no wise increases the 
general sentiment of confidence, or contributes any 
amazing luminousness to the clouded skies. The 
same author quoted above has also said, "life can 
never be a matter of exultation, nor can the progress of 
arts and sciences ever fill the heart of a man who has a 
heart to be filled.'' 

Not only is the world a mechanical device which 
amuses and interests us to solve, and incidentally 
enormously sharpens our wits in the doing of it, but we, 
its human elements, like another world of emotions 
imbedded in it, form a group of incessant and uncon- 
vinced questioners, whose curiosity perhaps has roots 
in their own unsatisfied hearts. And so, we are brought 
directly against the question, "what are our relations to 
the objective world, around and before us?" 

Now this question assumes many phases of in- 
tellectual interest. It may be the old metaphysical 
one as to whether the objective world exists in itself, 
and would be there with all its customary phenomena, 
if, by a conceivable annihilation we, as a race of per- 
ceiving creatures, were utterly abolished? Whether 
the world is a subjective creation, intrinsically appari- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 19 

tional, and subtending a realm of ideas arising in us, or 
whether irrespective of ideation it would carry on its 
retinue of changes, and multivariously expand into all 
the lineaments of living things we observe today, when 
no appreciative eye could admire them, and no inquisi- 
tive mind record them? It may be the more emotional 
question of what use is any connection between our- 
selves and the world, and what suppositions are 
requisite to explain our being here at all, especially as 
existence is a sharp fight against disease and want, 
with a minimum of rewards and a maximum of ir- 
relevant pains? 

It may be the more scientific question, is living in 
such a world desirable, and what conceivable stimulants 
for its continuance can be formulated that will excuse 
the perpetuation of its distresses? 

It may be the purely hedonistic query as to whether 
life is enjoyment, or whether it is meant for anything 
else than enjoyment, or the teleological one as to 
whether life has an object, and all of these questions 
may be infinitely modified by their juxtaposition to 
an infinite number of personal accidents and relations 
in those asking them. And yet all the same, as Mr. 
Stephen pertinently says, *'the material of which life is 
made may be, and probably in most cases is, satis- 
factory, for there can be no doubt that if life not only 
was an evil, but was felt and perceived to be such, the 
population would be speedily thinned by suicide or by 
vice," but he adds, ''it does not however, follow that 
because they find it pleasant they enjoy it," all of 
which is tantamount to saying that as we are here, we 



20 THE WORLD^S PRAYER 

stay here, having a pardonable repugnance to extinc- 
tion or even transportation, as in the latter case we are 
quite ignorant whether we shall be as well off as we are. 
Our Predicament is quite unmistakable even under 
any and all halcyon skies — even though we feel at 
moments Whitman's robust exultation in living, 

I exist as I am, that is enough, 

If no other in the world be aware I sit content, 

And if each and all be aware I sit content, 

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that 
is myself. 

And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand, 
or two million years, 

I can cheerfully take it now or with equal cheerfulness I 
can wait. 

My foothold is tenoned and mortis'd in granite 

I laugh at what you call dissolution and I know the am- 
plitude of time. 

Most men are driven to thought, at times, from 
inclination, as most men are driven, invariably, to 
thought from bereavement and disappointment; and 
when we think, we are certainly impressed with the 
meaningless darkness about us — especially if we con- 
trive to feel for the bewildered masses submerged in 
toil and almost animal insensibility, for the fallen 
lives that have filled the centuries with suffering. 

There does remain indeed the interpretation of the 
world which Prof. James has labelled ''subjectivism," 
and which may, genially regarded by those not actually 
participants in the storm and wrack of the world, be 
made into a serviceable consolation. For subjectivism 
means that view of the world which turns it into a 
spectacle and a play. It is the romantic interpretation 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 21 

of the world of which Prof. James writes, "if the dilem- 
ma of determinism be to choose between it — subjectiv- 
ism — and pessimism, I see little room for hesitation 
from the strictly theoretical point of view. Subjec- 
tivism seems the more rational scheme. And the world 
may, possibly, for aught I know, be nothing else. 
When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its forms 
and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the 
most brutal and the most spiritual things are lit by the 
same sun, and each is an integral part of the total rich- 
ness — why then it seems a grudging and sickly way of 
meeting so robust a universe, to shrink from any of its 
facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly 
dramatic point of view and treat the whole thing as a 
great unending romance which the spirit of the universe, 
striving to realize its own content, is eternally thinking 
out and representing to itself." (The Dilemma of 
Determinism.) 

Certainly the philosophers of all degrees and preten- 
sions have not been inactive in preparing solutions of 
this world, and our relations to it, but they sound such 
weird and inconclusive notes, and to average intelli- 
gences seem so bewildering and unnatural, that 
philosophy in this day of direct material convictions 
produces the effect so graphically depicted by Prof. 
James' student. 

"This young man, who was a graduate of some wes- 
tern college, began by saying that he had always taken 
for granted that when you entered a philosophic class 
room you had to open relations with a universe entirely 
distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. 



22 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

The two were supposed, he said, to have so Httle to do 
with each other, that you could not possibly occupy 
your mind with them at the same time. The world of 
concrete personal experiences, to which the street be- 
longs, is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, 
muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which 
your philosophy professor introduces you is simple, 
clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are 
absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles 
of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its 
parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. 
It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill." 

Fortunately psychology has here, and in this scientific 
day intervened, and formed a via media which somehow 
seems to render philosophy more tolerable or at least 
brings it closer to our affections. By the introduction 
of facts which we know and recognize, even the dry 
fabric and, as James says, the ''hurdy-gurdy monotony'* 
of Spencer's philosophy gains a human interest. 

Now however Our Predicament is not to most of us 
work-a-day people the clamorous need of defining our 
metaphysical positions — the restlessness of thinkers in 
splitting up our consciousness, the logical firmness 
which they display in separating percept from concept ; 
it is not surely any unsatisfied craving to be told that 
the object is modified by the receptivities of the sub- 
ject, and that the external world in se is Unknowable, 
nor do we particularly care whether as Mr. Hodgson 
tells us ''that before Reflection the is of judgment is 
the is of the Copula, in reflection first, and then in its 
derivatives, it becomes the is of existence"; the cogni- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 23 

tions a priori, and the categorical imperative scarcely 
interest us. 

If we express our queries as to our relations to the 
objective world in the language of the street, or the 
workshop, or the reflective moments which come in 
those pauses when the obstreperous and importunate 
world recedes from our attention, and weariness of 
things fatigues us, if we should utter what we then feel, 
it might be in words like these ; ' 'we are the descendants 
of millions upon millions of beings like ourselves, who 
have engaged in the tasks of living and generally under 
conditions less favorable to happiness than ourselves; 
this population enormous in its extent, which has 
utterly vanished, contained every variety of human 
mind, and was not inconsiderably provided with 
wonderful individual intellects : What is called History 
is made up of the actions and interactions of these 
incalculable multitudes and, for the most part, it has 
been a record of painful tragedies, bloodthirsty wars, 
infinite physical suffering, the display of ignoble and 
ruthless passions, with innumerable instances of sub- 
lime heroism and patience and exalted ideals, and the 
slow emergence of self-governed and comparatively 
comfortable communities, such as represent the ad- 
vanced civilized states of this present time. 

"From all this compilation of human lives we sur- 
vive, together with our heritage from them of wise 
thoughts and beautiful creations, but of them, those 
who left us the thoughts and the creations — a colossal 
aggregate of immaterialities, assuming Mind to be 
immaterial — not a breath, not a whisper of reassurance 



24 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

that they have in any way resisted the shock of physical 
dissolution! As far as we see, their obliteration is 
about as complete as the erasure of the chalk marks 
from a blackboard with a wet sponge, or the solution 
of the mists into transparent air under the heat of the 
sun. Where are they? Anywhere? Knowing how 
insatiably we crave an indubitable sign from them is it 
not surprising that they give none? Have these de- 
parted ones to whom Life so affluently administered 
its joys, even though it also mingled the salutary 
shadows of its disappointments, quite forgotten all they 
cherished, or has Memory with them perished with the 
mutation of the mere body, and disappeared into the 
incessant chase of atoms, or, more modernly yet, into 
the inconceivable energy of electrons? 

''And yet further; if questionings and remonstrance 
have arisen as education and reflection have advanced, 
if Revelation, as it is called, seems obviously insuffi- 
cient, at least for those who find its utterance painfully 
inadequate, and the history of its tenets and its con- 
fessors humiliating, if matters as we know them seem 
to contradict some of the vital affirmations of that 
Revelation, why is there not, at this favorable moment, 
some response to our legitimate demand from the 
source of the Revelation itself? Surely the old state- 
ments need reinforcement. If it is so important for us 
to believe that Revelation, why not a little help? Can 
not the Sources of the other revelation supply this new 
day with another, or if not another, in any kind of 
aesthetic and spiritual completeness, then a Sign? 
God should tell us again that He is in the Universe, in 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 25 

this world of ours, and that this life is not the end; for 
as James Fitzjames Stephen has well said; 'This is the 
vital question of all. It is the true centre, not only of 
Mr. Mill's book upon liberty, but of all the great discus- 
sions of our day and generation. Upon this hangs all 
religion, all morals, all politics, all legislation — every- 
thing which interests men as men. Is there or not a God 
and a future state? Is this world all?' " 

This expresses broadly Our Predicament. It has 
reached proportions of intellectual embarrassment for 
many today, because of an immensely enlarged know- 
ledge of nature, wherein the Reign of Law, once estab- 
lished in the physical universe, has been widely detected 
in the mental and moral. Perhaps to the great mass of 
toilers, at least in these United States, more tolerable 
conditions of living blunt their eagerness to have any 
recourse to supernatural avenues of assistance. To a 
great many men and women, and the number of these is 
daily growing, it is certain, or almost so, that there is no 
God and no future life, and generally speaking convic- 
tions of this sort must sensibly modify current conduct, 
though it is also a matter of plain observation that 
numbers of atheists and agnostics live up to standards 
rigorously just and high. But it seems impossible 
that all the sentiments that have enriched life and can 
be directly traced to the influence of the spiritual 
teachings of Religion may yet be retained, when the 
primary articles of such a faith are rejected or so diluted 
with doubts as to suffer a complete textual deterioration. 

It is also quite true that in many ways the interest 
of living derives an intensity from the hazardous posi- 



26 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

tion we occupy. The jeopardy of being damned or the 
chance of being saved and blessed are certainly worth 
considering, even if being damned means only extinc- 
tion, and being saved and blessed means some further 
extension of our present state under conditions more 
delightful, if not of ideal felicity. The rational objec- 
tion to any such a supposition is naturally the diffi- 
culty of associating the tremendous import of the things 
implied with the apparently indifferent attitude of 
saying Yes or No to a series of unproved, unprovable, 
and somewhat unreal assertions. To be sure a great 
deal can in this matter be urged by the apologist of 
religion, in any shape, to the effect that assent simply to 
a creed is not in any effective way a real belief; that 
Belief wins its transcendental reward when it is so 
deeply assimilated in the moral and mental tissues, so to 
speak, of its recipient or professor, that it guides every 
motion of his life, and colors every thought, and con- 
sistently ministers to the order and the contents of his 
judgments. But however regarded it is clear that 
Religion has introduced the element of Risk in life, and 
does, quite suitably, mingle its obscurities with the 
pervasive nebulae that so closely and variously en- 
velop us. 

Apart from the question as to whether there is a God 
and a Future Life, which would sensibly render our 
sufferings and vicissitudes of bereavement more toler- 
able, and perhaps point to their propitionary or proba- 
tional character and meaning, there must exist, with 
many, a subsidiary sense of vexation and perplexity 
over the commonness of our human position. The 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 27 

mere physiological requisites of our organization are 
vulgar and humiliating. The painful eccentricities of 
character and disposition accompanying physical de- 
formity and revolting appetites, the hideousness of 
sickness and the innumerable individual instances of a 
defective body. There seems to be an inseparable 
dirtiness in living, a kind of physical abjectness, a 
loathesome leprosy of nastiness which no one escapes; 
all life seems stained with the ordure of necessary 
animal habits. Our bodies are, we are taught, the 
results of Evolution, and like most things formed by 
that ubiquitous process, are a botch, a makeshift, a 
compromise. They are propagated by methods not 
generally discussed, though such methods form the 
ridiculous raison d'etre of a national literature — the 
French novel — they are nourished by an unbroken 
though discontinuous system of stuffing, which brings 
in its train a retinue of disagreeable and objectionable 
consequences, they have no permanence, they grow old 
and ugly and decline to death through stages of tire- 
some or pathetic weakness, and then, if Nature is 
allowed to have her way, they become a repository for 
worms, and mingle with the gases and the fluids and 
the soil of the earth in a succession of disgusting aspects. 
Lucidly regarded there is nothing in our bodies that 
ought to awaken pride. It is quite incontestable, and 
a matter of inquiry that with such an outfit of bodily 
characters, why we should not have, under proper con- 
ditions, some assurance that we may survive elsewhere 
more benignly. 

And if our body provokes discontent and a worried 
feeling of embarrassment, what is to be said about the 



28 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

social contract? In the thousands of years that the 
experiment of organized government has been tried no 
ideal results have been attained, and for the most part 
their history reveals an incessant struggle of an op- 
pressed part of the state to maintain or secure rights, 
indubitably theirs, which another portion, for purely 
selfish motives, refuses to concede. It is sure that there 
is progress along the lines of improvement, and ameliora- 
tion, but no sooner do we find ourselves advanced in 
one direction than our discomfited attention is called to 
the fact that we have receded along others, though 
usually we have no reason to think that we have not 
gained in sane and sanitary living. On the whole our 
life is a little preposterous and unmistakably mysterious. 
Doubtless there may be those who can be described 
in the language which Leslie Stephen uses to express his 
brother's — James Fitzjames' — opinion of Dicken's 
novels; ''a world of smug little tradesmen of shallow 
and half-educated minds, with paltry ambitions, utter 
ignorance of history and philosophy, shrinking in- 
stinctively from all strenuous thought and resenting 
every attack upon the placid optimism in which it 
delights to wrap itself. It has no perception of the 
doubts and difficulties which beset loftier minds, or any 
consciousness of the great drama of history in which 
our generation is only playing its part for the passing 
hour." But it can hardly escape the notice of the 
most inopportune and thoughtless men that human 
life is a transitory matter, and that human society, like 
our material bodies, renews itself through an unceasing 
change of its individual components. They must feel 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 29 

the unsatisfactory relations we bear to the universe at 
large, if this life is the end of the story, and the summa- 
tion of a career of endeavor, self-control and achieve- 
ment counts for nothing to its author and actor, and is 
lost, irretrievably lost, in annihilation. They surely 
realize, even though with less potency than their fel- 
lows in the placid and eventless passage of their lives, 
that death and separation are facts, that sickness and 
pain are inevitable, and that old age and infirmity are 
unavoidable consequences, and that the crumbling of a 
lifetime into the narrow limits of a coffin seems an indis- 
putably inglorious termination to a life led, even within 
its straightened circumstances, with a just regard for the 
duties of the household. 

It can not altogether recommend itself to them to 
look at our existence as simply permissive, and that we 
should reconcile ourselves to extinction without a 
murmur, because we are as absolutely involuntary 
agents in the procession of the organic manifestations 
of our world, as the ants, the butterflies, or the swarm- 
ing motes in the sunbeam. And yet these *'smug 
optimists," that so much irritated the serious and 
thoughtful Stephen do not deserve so choleric a de- 
nunciation. It is most obvious today that people have 
drifted into a frame of mind which accepts life as they 
find it, without much protest and without much 
expectation. If they, fortunately for themselves, en- 
joy the ordinary pleasures, the activity of work accom- 
plished and delighted in, the serenity of happy homes, 
the enlightenment of knowledge, the wonders of dis- 
covery and the play of human sentiment and invention 



30 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

over the irridescent and changing surface of history and 
adventure, if they have health and friends, perhaps 
admiration and distinction, if they find their legitimate 
desires for some sort of perpetuation, in the promotion 
and guidance of families — as many do — fully gratified, 
if, above all, they feel that they have done their best, 
wronged no one, and played the part of men, they are 
not disturbed as the end of life approaches with senti- 
mental or religious fears, that they come to the edge of 
the grave and await the descent without wavering, or 
repulsion. These are not lean minded and dull or 
vulgarly self-satisfied people ; they are men and women 
who might say as Stephen said himself, "I have found 
life sweet, bright, glorious. I should dearly like to live 
again; but I am not afraid, and I hope when the time 
comes, I shall not be averse to die." 

Such persons undoubtedly realize Our Predicament. 
They would welcome any present and unmistakable 
proof that we survive the process of death although they 
might have some natural aversion to possible forms of a 
future existence, they are not prejudiced against the 
Revelation, which to religious and Christian believers 
in the extended arms of the Church, answers every 
need, but they practically deny its efficacy to meet 
present needs and, looked at in a large way, and under 
the scientific environment of the day, does it? 

To men such as William George Ward, and his 
biographer Wilfrid Ward, belief was not really difficult. 
The readers of Witnesses to the Unseen may recall the 
strong plea of Father Walton, as to the illuminative 
insight which personal interest gives to men in receiving 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 31 

the present evidences of Christianity. He argued with 
considerable reasonableness that in the first place "that 
where the satisfaction of believing a thing is what is 
desired, and the correspondence of a belief with objec- 
tive fact is a matter of small anxiety or importance to 
oneself, the wish is often father to the thought. Belief 
is readily obtained, although its quality is extremely 
bad. But where the truth of the fact is of the first im- 
portance, and an untrue belief is useless — where 
genuine conviction of the fact in question is desired, 
the desire will not beget readiness but rather caution in 
believing. It will make a man less easily convinced 
than another by the evidence ready to hand. He so 
much wishes that the thing shoud be true that he fears 
to believe it, holding, in the words of the proverb that 
it is too good to be true. But on the other hand, he is 
more ready than another to give himself every chance 
of discovering whether what he so much wishes for be 
really true. The wish then may be father to a shallow 
self-deceitful idea, but it renders true conviction in a 
certain sense slower although proportionally dearer 
and surer." 

And in the second place Walton argues, in the in- 
genious dialogue, that an interested man "will marshall 
the evidences which are offered to lead him to it with an 
activity of mind, and will ponder them with an earnest- 
ness, which one who views the whole matter as an 
interesting problem only, can never possess: and so he 
is convinced sooner, not through bias, but because the 
argument instead of remaining logical, formulae outside 
him, have taken full possession of his soul, and are felt 



32 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

not as vague ideas, but as facts, vividly realized in all 
their connexion with each other and with himself." 

In the third place, impelled by such internal condi- 
tions the searcher after truth finds that with its evi- 
dences and with its intrinsic nature Christianity appeals 
overpoweringly to him, and his surrender to it is quickly 
followed by a proportionate degree of moral comfort, 
emotional peace and intellectual rest. Among such 
inquirers the Wards, Newmans, Maurices, Froudes, 
may be naturally placed, and their assent to the super- 
natural character and enduring sufficiency of the 
Christian religion readily understood. 

But the temperament of this day is a little more 
practical and less abstruse. Our Predicament involves 
no essential objection to Christianity — rather indeed 
with its moral and spiritual aspects there is today a 
very sincere admiration — but clearer and less argu- 
mentative proofs. And — unless perhaps those souls 
are only acceptable to God who can accept the revela- 
tion under its present limitations of doubt — for the 
best interests of humanity it would seem a reasonable 
request that in some way the revelation should be 
reinforced. Many are driven shrewdly to suspect that 
God does not minutely consider the state of men nor 
conclusively direct their individual motions. Many 
of the promises in the revelation demonstrably do not 
seem to be fulfilled. It is harder today than ever 
perhaps before to believe it, as it antagonizes the 
scientific temper — which let it be observed is a very 
honest and just one — though it may be observed that 
it cooperates with a purely credulous one. Can it not 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 33 

be frankly asked that God grant another revelation 
supplementary and coercive and save the earth from 
a total collapse from faith? It would certainly appear 
that never in the history of the race has a time de- 
veloped when revelation would be more intelligently 
welcomed by thousands who might secure from it 
their peace of mind and — in the language of theology — 
their own salvation. 

It was indeed Cardinal Newman who penned the 
following words, words which might be found so natur- 
ally in the mouths of thousands who have utterly 
failed to reach the cardinal's compact and absorbing 
faith and who do not find as he did a convincing voice 
rebuking their doubts. Newman has written; ''the 
world seems simply to give the lie to that great truth 
(the existence of God) of which my being is so full: 
and the effect upon me is, in consequence as a matter of 
necessity, as confusing as if it denied that I am in 
existence myself. If I looked in a mirror and did not 
see my face I should have the sort of feeling which 
actually comes upon me, when I look into the living 
busy world and see no reflection of its Creator. This 
is to me one of those great difficulties of this absolute 
primary truth, to which I referred just now. Were it 
not for this voice speaking so clearly in my conscience 
and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a 
polytheist, when I look into the world. The sight of 
the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll, 'full 
of lamentations and mourning and woe'." 

Now the attitude of sentimental longing and spiritual 
aspiration is not the characteristic attitude of the most 



34 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

of men today. They feel — and it would seem rightly — 
that the revelation needs replenished evidences, a 
strengthened modern rehabiliament, some sort of 
reiteration or, as I have said, reenforcement. The 
events of the revelation are far off, and so distant that 
they lose their effectiveness, and the many things said 
in them as to the imminence of God do not seem alto- 
gether vraisemblahle, in a day that is revelling in 
knowledge that was utterly unapprehended at the time 
of the revelation itself. If the revelation is of soul- 
saving importance why may not the reasonable quest 
or petition for its present reestablishment be enter- 
tained? The processes of thought seem now all repug- 
nant to the spirit of the revelation, seem distinctly 
antagonistic to its atmosphere of supernatural design 
and execution. 

The Christian doctrine is a most reasonable one, as 
meeting our objections to the hardships, disgusts and 
sorrows of this earth, with the assurance that the earth 
is only a stepping stone to better things, is a place of 
probation and preparation, the foreordained theatre 
of conflict and trial, in which the faithful and believing 
man is also the foreordained protagonist. This has a 
sane and adequate sound, but when we inspect its 
history, promises, and assumed prerogatives, it does 
not seem to many, imbued with the materialistic 
impressions overwhelmingly created in this scientific 
day, at all probable, or possible. It can be frankly 
said today that it suffers discredit, because it appears 
unsupported. Its fondest assertions as to the efficacy 
of prayer, and the immediate watchfulness of God over 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 35 

the interests of his children, is far from incontrovertible, 
and, in an age when the inner visions of faith are dis- 
couraged, the Doctrine needs some forcible and convinc- 
ing reiteration. It can hardly be questioned that its 
message needs renewal. 

At present it lacks spectacular potency. This 
language must not be misunderstood. It is not used 
in a derisive or disparaging sense. It only indicates the 
absence of supernatural power in the Christian church. 
There is a hopeless attempt at it in the Pope, but 
really what does that amount to? Under present 
conditions the Pope — proclaimed as the Vicar of Christ 
— seems to be an excellent man, with absolutely no 
power, and with his church — if appearances in France 
are not deceiving — falling away from him, and he seems 
nothing more. He is surrounded with imagery and 
symbols, but he is helpless and, one would say, not 
superior in substantial influence over any ordinary 
other man with good sense and an irreproachable record. 

Perhaps the nearest recent approach to the kind 
of phenomenon we crave is the Christian scientist 
movement, which in a way does interrogate our won- 
der, and at any rate quite obdurately asks God to 
assert his power and fulfill the expectations of his 
disciples, to the confusion of scepticism and empiricism. 
But this Christian church or organization has fallen into 
disrepute and fails. Its startling tenet that there is no 
such thing as matter — of course a familiar philosophical 
hobby — is not assumed in the Christian dispensation, 
but its immediate reliance upon God as a possible, 
Nay! an absolute controller over disease and disaster, 



36 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

is. But intellectually this body is destitute, and even 
without emotional grandeur, while its founder, Mrs. 
Eddy, is so surprisingly silly, and her ridiculous book — 
the Bible or Commission of this interesting society — so 
utterly confounds one with its empty phrases and 
sophomoric orphism that it can scarcely be expected to 
greatly influence or reestablish faith. 

What is needed? As the matter now stands it would 
seem that of all the religions offered to the tw^entieth 
century man, with a good heart and an enlightened 
understanding and imagination, and with aptitude for 
religious feelings, is this same discredited Christianity, 
but it requires a renewed substantial emphasis. It 
received this emphasis in the past when people were 
more credulous, and when fables and hearsay miracles 
were implicitly believed. This answered well enough. 
It will scarcely answer now. The spirit of the Catholic 
church realizes this keenly, and wisely, and I am far 
from questioning some of its manifold instances of 
supernatural intervention. It understands that the 
world will not cling to God, if He is too far away, if 
He does not show Himself at times, and impressively 
and beautifully reawaken the ardor and the constancy 
of devotion to Him, by visions and manifestations full of 
spiritual sweetness. 

It is an organic necessity. Our faith needs replenish- 
ment by occasional stimulation. It is creditable to the 
hardihood and earnestness of our religious desires that 
we keep on believing with such stringent circumstances 
of opposition to weaken and destroy faith. Reassur- 
ance is an obvious help. The parable of the rich man 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 37 

in Hell fire who wished to return to the earth to tell his 
brothers of the fact of future punishment, and who was 
denied this privilege because they would not believe 
"though one rose from the dead" is certainly not 
applicable now. Nothing would be of more startling 
efficacy and immediate remedial force to broken faiths, 
than just such a phenomenon. It might be subjected 
to very sharp scrutiny, and the requirements of evi- 
dence be somewhat abruptly and sternly insisted on. 
But who can doubt that the plain proof of such an 
occurrence would not have an extraordinarily healthful 
result in charging our languid hopes with a new fire? 

It is incontestable that religious interests have, in a 
noticeable degree, receded before the pushing exuber- 
ance of innumerable modern diversions, studies, and 
mental, social, and purely personal indulgences. Re- 
ligion is vague, and the subjects of science, of history, 
of literature seem immensely real, vital, and attractive. 
They exclude religion by developing a tone of thought, 
and exciting a range of appetite and enthusiasm to 
which religion is repugnant or even partially ludicrous, 
and by religion we mean generally Christian doctrine. 
Men feel shy of it, and there seem monumental objec- 
tions to, it might almost be said disproofs of, its provi- 
sions and assertions. 

Why not a renovation, a new dispensation? It 
might be greatly feared by those who recall, at least 
from contemporaneous records, how religious ecstacy 
and hallucination made men forget and neglect the 
business and the learning of this world, and fall into 
unwise and ruinous habits of unrestrained devotion. 



38 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

These temporary perturbations would be of slight 
importance, in comparison with the incommensurate 
value of a renewed revelation. The obdurate pessi- 
mism of the day would vanish before such a dispensation, 
and the sluggish or paralyzed beliefs of the faithful 
become galvanized with power. Nothing could be 
more certain. And is not this desirable? Are the 
present conditions satisfactory, or from the Christian 
standpoint conducive to the welfare of the world? 
Apparently, judging from the repeated lamentations of 
the preachers at the unfilled churches, not. It is not ap- 
parent that there is less real benevolence in the world 
than in the days of a thorough going faith, and especi- 
ally not in this country. But there has grown up a 
fundamental skepticism as to the things of the next 
world, and a hardly concealed wonder that anyone 
cares to regulate his life by considerations based on the 
particular chances he may expect, of happiness here- 
after as a reward for his conduct here. 

The events of the world take place without any 
discoverable reference to the ideal, and utterly without 
reference to justice. As Prof. Royce has written in 
that wonderful book of his — The Religious Aspect of 
Philosophy — ''other evil (than that which is deliber- 
ately chosen) seems absolutely mysterious, when viewed 
with reference to God's goodness; and very little of the 
evil that we experience in this world is the direct result 
of the deliberate choice of those who suffer it. It is 
hardly necessary to illustrate these facts which belong 
to the best known and most frequently misrepresented 
of the matters of human controversy. The poor of 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 39 

great cities, the men who inherit loathsome diseases, 
the naturally weak of will, the insane, the sufferers in 
accidents, the soldiers led to slaughter, the slaves, the 
down-trodden peasants and laborers of the world: all 
these, whose ills are simply inconceivable in might, have 
no more brought all this on themselves of their own free 
will, than have the healthy and happy, the heirs of 
wealth, the ever joyous, earned for themselves the 
good fortune to which they are born." 

In this same book we are shown in a most eloquent 
manner the struggle for some sort of interpretation of 
this weary world and its ultimate discomfiture and 
repulse; shown it in the poets and philosophers and 
thinkers, until we reach ethical skepticism and ethical 
pessimism, and land ourselves in such illogical and in- 
supportable rubbish as Schopenhauer's inimical Will, or 
Hartman's obstreperous and malicious Unbewustsein. 
Innumerable apologies are composed, and endless 
figments of systems proposed, by which the dreary 
perplexity can be made endurable, besides all sorts of 
most admirable cries and adjurations for us to keep our 
courage up and wait. And in the midst of it all, are a 
consecrated few who are busy winning fame for their 
creations, their science, or their acts, so busy indeed 
that they have no time to become querulous or lachry- 
mose. 

But these probationary conditions ought to stop, and 
some resounding or — let it be even so — obscurely 
critical communication come to us from the Unknown, 
from God, if that be possible, and pierce the gloom with 
some unwonted and amazing illumination. 



40 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

If this could be, much might be lost; the shadowy 
wonderment, the fitful strokes of light, the blind brave 
fighting, the incessant experiment, the genial material- 
ism, the dramatic intensity, the variable siege of the 
outlying darkness, the fortitude and patience, the 
blinded rush at all sorts of calls, hither and thither, 
and the wayward leapings of the wicked and the 
amusing; this might disappear, to the lasting injury of 
literature, and the circulating library, and the news- 
paper, but it might disappear in the seething glow of 
an uplifted spiritual life. 



CHAPTER II 
A Silent or a Speaking God 

The assumption of a God is a difficult one to deal 
with. For in the first place what does it really imply 
and how shall we draw the lineaments of a situation so 
extraordinary; where are we supposed to place God, or 
under what material aspects are we permitted to regard 
Him and preserve the philosophical outlines this 
marvellous conception demands? It is quite possible 
to become frivolous, and it is no less likely that we may 
be incomprehensible. From what datum can we start 
in forming an ideal of Him, what elements does He 
involve, and when constructed what are His necessary 
relations to us? We can only proceed in this superlative 
quest by analogy, and the facts in the case, if they mean 
anything, must be extracted from the acknowledged 
views of the Christian church because the experimental 
test we are looking for is the logical consequence of 
those views. 

If we are not mistaken those views hold that God 
made the world, that in that sense He is the father of 
men, that He is a spirit omnipotent, omniscient, and 
eternal, and — on this we base our hopes — He is sympa- 
thetically involved in the eternal happiness of the 
human race, that the human race is, in a profound 
sense alienated from Him, and that He has provided 
ways and means for their reconciliation. It has often 



42 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

been pointed out that this conception is not philosophi- 
cally perfect, that it is self-contradictory and defective, 
and that it seems to be very violently impeached by 
history. Prof. Royce has in one particular indicated a 
"fruitful and serious difficulty"; it is found in the fact 
''that the concept of producing an external thing 
involves, of necessity, a relation to a Law, above both 
producer and product, which determines the conditions 
under which there can be a product at all. The 
creative power must then work under conditions how- 
ever magical and mysterious its acts may be. And 
working under conditions it must be finite. No device 
for minimizing the meaning of this separation of crea- 
tive power and created thing will really escape the 
difficulty resulting. And this difficulty will appear in 
all cases of supposed creation. It may be summed up 
once more in the statement that any creative power in 
act, just as much needs explanation in some higher law 
and power as does the thing created itself, so that, 
whatever creates a product external to itself becomes 
thereby as truly dependent a power as we ourselves are." 

But this does not matter. The quest we are on is a 
practical one, and is unconcerned with the antinomies 
of Christian definition. Accepting the Christian pos- 
tulates can we inaugurate a plan for securing still more 
conclusive — in a modern sense — information about 
the very things which lie at the root of Christian hopes, 
the existence of God himself and the fact of a Future 
Life? 

It is quite evident that there are conceptions of God 
which would offer us no such possibilities. The Un- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 43 

knowable of Mr. Spencer's for instance, under no con- 
ceivable predicaments of invocation, would vouchsafe 
the smallest answer to our importunities. The pan- 
theistic idea would be equally unresponsive. With 
these deities an answer would upset the demiurgic 
equilibrium, and introduce a discordant note in the 
sublime and massively indifferent progress of events, 
in the evolution of the universe, in which the wind 
that blows or the violet starting into bloom, are 
coequal parts, along with man, in its foreordained and 
limitless destiny. Neither the Unknowable of Spencer 
nor the Panurge of Spinoza, could spare time to eluci- 
date themselves in any way to questioning and grieved 
men, they would explicitly invoke their own destruction 
by definition. But the God of Christianity has already 
— accepting the revelation — particularized himself by 
a word, a sign. No human thought could determine 
the conditions which provoked so momentous an inci- 
dent, but is it not possible by rational surmises to devise 
a way to interpellate God and win new avowals? 
There may seem to be an intemperate hardihood about 
such a proposition, but is it unreasonable? It is 
suggested in no scoffing or delusive mood. Let us see 
more particularly what a revelation from God implies, 
for no happenings under the sun would impress one as 
being more stupendous. 

We have elsewhere (The World as Intention) sug- 
gested that the Christian revelations were promulgated 
under the stimulus of Desire and Necessity, and it is 
evident, without rehearsing the reflections recorded 
there, that this implies in God an emotional, and what 



44 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

for a better term we may designate as a forensic nature ; 
viz. a nature accessible to the appeals of sympathy, of 
pity, of supplication, and a nature open to the claims of 
reason, inasmuch as the necessity above mentigned 
must have been a rationally recognized necessity. If 
on other grounds than the revelations themselves this 
could be established, these would seem to be distinctly 
helpful to our hopes. And on other grounds than the 
revelations we shall attempt here to at least make it 
overpoweringly probable, and all this on the Christian 
hypothesis. A fundamental postulate of that hypothe- 
sis is that God made the universe and is its sole and 
responsible author and therefore the avenue of approach 
to His attributes might be in a general way reached 
through His creation. 

Certainly it may be difficult to conceive the method 
or the mode of such creation ; it might land us in some 
absurdity if we searched too minutely to explain just 
what we meant by creation, but it is almost self evident 
that, assuming creation, the nature of the Creator 
should therein appear. 

At the same time we are acquainted with views which 
seem to make the God of the Universe a self-involved 
principle, embodying Himself in the myriad aspects of 
the world which are supposed to express Him, but out- 
side of which He cannot be, and which are related to 
Him as the leaves, the flowers and the fruits of the tree 
are to the germinal power of growth the whole tree 
expresses. The theory has a kind of biological expres- 
sion as if the world or the universe was a sort of develop- 
ment, an infinitely varied and ubiquitously extended 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 45 

manifestation in a consubstantial way of the God. 
And, for that matter, we humans are bits, fragments, 
locaHzed reflections of Him, ''together with all forms, 
moods, shows" of matter, for the whole w^orld is mind. 
Says Royce — the very remarkable interpreter and 
missionary of this idealism — ''they are perfectly right, 
therefore, who deny designs as factors in natural 
processes. The true World-Will, being no phenomenon 
in space and time, is no form of physical energy, and 
moves no matter. 

"The laws of matter more or less completely portray, 
but do not, physically speaking, result from the Logos. 
No creative fiat produced the world at any moment in 
past time. To say that would be to assert the exis- 
tence somewhere in time of an utterly indescribable 
event which is precisely what nobody can assert of the 
world of time, since this world is nothing unless in so 
far as it is describable. For the same reason no will, 
infinite or finite, ever, by any temporal interference, 
turned aside a single atom in its flight. The physical 
world shows us, indeed, a plan, but only in so far as the 
space and time phenomena symbolize and very poorly 
translate an unity, that, as it is in itself, is an unity of 
will, of self-consciousness, of a divine interest in truth, 
of an equally divine self-possession, of an eternal rest in 
the fullness of perfected being. In this will, the finite 
wills themselves share, and of it they are a part, since 
this unity includes, knows and justifies the organized 
relationships of the whole universe of finite apprecia- 
tions. The physical world expresses such a world-will, 
but is not subject to the interference of this will." 



46 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

Now that evidently is not the Christian conception 
though it often borrows in its exposition the current 
aphorisms of Christian phraseology. The test, herein 
purported to be suggested, is based on the Christian 
view, and in that view God is revealed in the visible 
universe and in mind, but He is revealed as a workman is 
by his work. He stands outside and supereminent to 
His work and suffers no diminution of authority over 
His creation, at any time. And while He may have far- 
off fixed omniscient and imperturbable designs, the 
Christian thought interjects the paradox that He is still 
open to intercession, to the practiced and co-ordinated 
appeal of spirits. But does His creation furnish grounds 
for believing that He is sensitive to the claims of emo- 
tion and reason? A creator can remain outside of his 
work and occupy to it very contrasted relations. It 
might express his nature exactly, so that the careful 
observer or the skillful analyst could divine the peculiar 
or unique qualities, the temperamental meaning of the 
author and perhaps draw indubitable conclusions as to 
his temper and his taste. Again it is quite conceivable 
that the work of an artist or an author may be a forced 
disguise of himself, and exhibit, by means of his em- 
bracing art, his controlled technique, a nexus of quali- 
ties that are not appropriate to him at all ; that incon- 
testably misrepresent and burlesque him. He might 
be driven to such expedients to hide his own identity, or 
for the indulgence of some interesting jest or deception. 
Taken in connexion with the making of a universe the 
latter conception seems curiously humiliating. There 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 47 

might indeed be another intention. The world or any 
other commensurate creation, might be intended to be 
a display, a mere drama, an exhibition, a monstrous 
vaudeville show, ''all with no deeper purpose than just 
life in all its endlessness, motion, striving, changing, 
flying, struggling, wandering, returning to itself, on- 
ward-flying, conflict, fullness, of power, even though 
that shall mean fullness of sorrow and anguish." 
Views of this sort as to the nature and origin of the 
universe are not incongruous to the philosophies of 
pessimism, to the ingenious devices of Schopenhauer 
and Van Hartman but they are utterly repugnant to 
the Christian doctrine, to that beneficent ideal of a 
creative God who in the first approved His world as 
''good," and who later witnessed its pollution by the 
development of that germinal power of choice which 
mysteriously introduced a train of consequences which 
deprived the world of its crystalline clarity and limpid 
beauty, and in making it turbid with passion and wick- 
edness, administered to it also the higher possibilities of 
virtue, since as Hegel says "die Tugend ist der hochste, 
vollendete Kampf." 

Now it seems quite certain that if God did make the 
world, that however much its original outlines, linea- 
ments, and configurations have been distorted by the 
entrance of something called Sin, there is enough of its 
first state left for us to catch a very informing glimpse 
of what kind of a god, God is, and if so, then whether He 
would appear to be open to the calls of reason and com- 
passion. This inquiry cannot but prove entertaining. 



48 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

and remember Reader that we are working on Christian 
postulations not altogether with confidence, but by 
hypothesis. Our immediate design is to find out, if we 
can, how much of the world before the 'Tall" remains 
in the world we all objectively see around us. To do 
that it will be necessary to classify this objective world 
under categories of existence, and for that objective 
world we accept the sort of reality which M. Poincare 
has given it in his thoughtful essays on the "Value of 
Science," and which I think would be adequate for the 
concessions of authoritative Christianity. He says 
variously; ''external objects, for instance, for which the 
word object was invented, are really objects and not 
fleeting and fugitive appearances, because they are not 
only groups of sensations, but groups cemented by a 
constant bond. It is this bond, and this bond alone, 
which is the object in itself, and this bond is a 
relation. 

"Therefore when we ask what is the objective 
value of science, that does not mean: does science 
teach us the true nature of things? but it means: 
does science teach us the true relations of things? 

"To the first question, no one would hesitate to 
reply. No; but I think we may go farther; not 
only science cannot teach us the nature of things; 
but nothing is capable of teaching it to us, and 
if any god knew it, he could not find words to 
express it. Not only can we not divine the response, 
but if it were given us, we could understand nothing 
of it; I ask myself even whether we understand the 
question. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 49 

"When, therefore, a scientific theory pretends to 
teach us what heat is, or what is electricity, or life, it is 
condemned beforehand; all it can give us is only a 
crude image. It is therefore provisional and crumb- 
Hng. 

''The first question being out of reason, the second 
remains. Can science teach us the true relations of 
things? What it joins together should that be put 
asunder, what it puts asunder should that be joined 
together?" And he answers this last question, that 
generally and in the long run science does find out 
permanent relations. And as to our belief in external 
objects; ''these latter are real in this, that the 
sensations they make us feel appear to us as united 
to each other by I know not what indestructible 
cement and not hy the hazard of a day. In the same 
way science reveals to us between phenomena other 
bonds finer but not less solid; these are threads so 
slender that they long remain unperceived, but once 
noticed there remains no way of not seeing them ; they 
are therefore not less real than those which give their 
reality to external objects; small matter that they are 
more recently known, since neither can perish before 
the other." 

If then this apparent external world can in a real 
sense be so considered, and we are searching in it for the 
evidences of the susceptibilities of the God, who made 
it, to our natural requests for knowledge, and we are 
therein engaged, on the general Christian hypothesis, 
we must look for those evidences in the unspoiled 
residues of the world left still unsullied by the Fall, and 



50 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

in which most naturally we may expect to see God 
illuminatively reflected. 

However ludicrous to the scientific mind the doctrine 
of a Fall seems, as applied to the material world and 
its inhabitants, it is, as we understand it, a very sig- 
nificant dogma in Christian theologies and this whole 
essay is intended to test the Christian position. Cer- 
tainly no credence could be given by science to any 
such doctrine as the Fall, which, in the view (held 
by science) of the slow evolution of Man from some 
sort of simian creature to the possession of a de- 
veloped mind, must only seem an absurd interpo- 
lation devised for the satisfaction of a theological 
dilemma. 

But we are quite right in insisting that the Christian 
Church promulgates that doctrine. Mr. C. W. E. 
Body, the Bishop Paddock lecturer for 1894, says in 
the Permanent Value of the Book of Genesis that 
"evil as we see it, approaches man from without. It 
has no original place either in human nature, or in the 
creation of which man is the divinely constituted 
representative and head. But evil though it does not 
originate in the creation, yet uses the creation as a 
means through which to make its approach. 

"The right relation in which man stood to the created 
things around him was already clearly indicated. He 
was to move amongst the creation as Prophet, Priest 
and King. As Prophet to represent God therein, as 
Priest to voice its unconscious service before God, as 
King to bring it into an ever deeper, more harmonious 
fellowship with himself, to defend it against the inroads 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 51 

of disorder and of moral evil. Clearly it was in this 
relation to the creation that man's supreme responsi- 
bility and testing lay; and so it is, in this special rela- 
tion, that the Tempter finds his ground of attack. 
Through the creation he obtains his channel of ap- 
proach. 

"The sad sequel is traced out in the succeeding narra- 
tives. There we see laid bare for all time the multi- 
various fruits of evil as it inworks itself into the whole 
life of man. The familiar adage, Corruptio optimi 
pessima, finds its fullest illustration in the pictures of 
the Book of Genesis. These pictures in which we 
behold one good gift of God after another — the glorious 
bounties of Nature, the strong ties of blood, the 
blessed obligation of worship, the advances of civili- 
zation, the relation between the sexes, the law of 
daily food, the bonds of social and national life, all 
in turn transformed beneath the touch of evil, minis- 
tering in different ways to the spread of its terrible 
power. 

"Each portion of the original gift is visited by an 
appropriate sentence after the Fall. In the sentence of 
death is involved the gradual weakening and ultimate 
deprivation of the endowments or image; whilst the 
loss of the Divine fellowship which lay at the back 
of the likeness, is plainly symbolized in the mandate of 
expulsion from Eden." 

So much authority. And now apart from the vitia- 
tion of man's character, his propulsion forward into a 
new realm of trials, struggles, temptations, obscurity 
of vision, and arduous efforts of discovery, what effects 



52 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

in this objective world of rocks, plants, and animals, 
might be expected from so portentous a moral 
cataclysm? 

Speculations of this sort are unquestionably enter- 
taining, though they put on perhaps the aspect of a too 
whimsical curiosity. The categories of this objective 
world, which Christian Philosophy usually accepts, may 
be summarized in the three divisions of the inorganic, 
the organic, and the mental world. How far would the 
Fall, the invasion of Sin affect any one of the three? 
If the objective world has a real existence outside of us, 
its percipients, then it would seem almost unquestion- 
able that a moral and mental deterioration could not 
affect the inorganic world, the world of heat and light 
laws, the world of electricity, of crystallographic 
growth, the world of gravitation, of chemistry, of 
physical constants generally. Into this world in esse 
turpitude, stupidity, disease, can effect no entrance. 
It is inconceivable. Into the world of plants and 
animals disease and death has certainly convincing 
sway. Was it, could it ever have been otherwise? 
It is assuredly a puzzling conception to think of the 
plant world without insect pests, or indeed of a plant 
world without its poisonous elements (many of which 
by the way are most useful to man), or finally of a 
plant world which did not yield to change, in which 
plants did not wither and perish the victims of fungi, 
or the severity of the season. 

Before the Fall were there no alternations of heat and 
cold, no summers, no winters, no frost? Was Eden a 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 53 

region of meteorological placidity so absolute that even 
the laws of flowering and fruitage were suspended? 
And then with regard to animals. Before the Fall did 
they exist together in an ideal community of forgetful- 
ness and love? Did the carnivorous beasts forget the 
lessons or the habits of their ages of evolution, and 
forego the nutrital necessities of eating their herbivor- 
ous brethren? And as to all of them did they present 
more pleasing pictures of comity and cleanliness than 
they do today? Was the essential obscenity of beasts 
expurgated, and a parlor behaviour substituted of 
agreeable forbearance and unassuming modesty? Is 
evolution a dream, or the projected hallucination of 
a metaphysical Logos? Before the Fall were there no 
poisonous reptiles, and can it be possible, as Bishop 
Patrick has said, that the snake walked in some way on 
his hinder parts? Is there not in all this a kind of rub- 
bishy phantasmagory of ignorance and assumption? 
It is worth while however to go farther and see 
what the fathers of theology say about these strange 
matters. 

That the patristic writers and the theological doctors 
and the various faculties of divinity assert the Fall is a 
commonplace of Christian theodicy, but what effect this 
momentous collapse had upon animated nature, or if it 
had any, is not so discernible in their utterances. 
Milton perchance has spoken with the most in- 
genuous and poetic simplicity, about the paradisaic 
conditions as they impressed organic life in that orig- 
inal Eden; 



54 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

About them frisking play'd 
All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase 
In wood or wilderness, forest or den; 
Sporting the lion ramp'd, and in his paw 
Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards, 
GamboU'd before them; the unwieldy elephant. 
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed 
His lithe proboscis; close the serpent sly. 
Insinuating wove with Gordian twine 
His braided train, and of his fatal guile 
Gave proof unheeded: others on the grass 
Couch'd, and, now fill'd with pasture, gazing sat, 
Or bedward ruminating; for the sun, 
Declined, was hasting now with prone career 
To the ocean isles; and, in the ascending scale 
Of heaven, the stars that usher evening, rose. 

Now this idyllic picture submitted to the attention 
of a zoological congress would be greeted with tem- 
pestuous laughter or be even more slightingly consider- 
ed by contemptuous silence. It is ludicrously barren 
of any — the remotest scientific probability. However 
in this present essay the scruples, or the censure, or, for 
that matter the approval of Science is utterly negli- 
gible, as the suggestions finally urged are urged upon 
Christian assumptions, and are intended to have their 
weight only with orthodox Christian believers. And 
therefore as we are anxious to discover such traces of 
God's nature in His creation as will justify us in asserting 
His openness or accessibility to legitimate inquiry, and 
His compassionate consideration of importunate needs, 
and as the Christian dogma of a Fall, may have seri- 
ously impaired the validity of those traces, we are 
concerned to find out how far, upon Christian authority ^ 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 55 

such a lesion of the primal perfection has obscured the 
divine lineaments in the natural world, exclusive of man. * 
A search, perhaps not exhaustively conducted, does 
not give us such exact impressions as seem desirable. 
It is certainly quite conspicuous — interestingly so — how 
the early fathers and authorities of Christian profes- 
sions, apologies, letters, epistles, tracts, and theses, dwell 
upon the human aspects of sin and elaborate the conse- 
quences of the Fall, with relation almost solely to the 
life, character and conduct of man, as an individual or 
in his social units. They are cognizant of the world of 

*This from Ruskin (Modern Painters) has a most whimsical and curious 
beauty and tenderness 

" *To dress and to keep it.' 

That then, was to be our work. Alas! what work have we set ourselves 
upon instead! How have we ravaged the garden instead of kept it — feeding 
our war-horses with its flowers, and splitering its trees into spear-shafts. 

'And at the East a flaming sword.' 
Is its flame quenchless, and are those gates that keep the way indeed pass- 
able no more, or is it not rather we no more desire to enter? For what can we 
conceive of that first Eden which we might not yet win back if we chose? It 
was a place full of flowers, we say. Well: the flowers are always striving 
to grow wherever we sufi^er them; and the fairer the closer. There may 
have been indeed a Fall of Flowers, as a Fall of Man; but assuredly 
creatures such as we are can now fancy nothing lovelier than roses and 
lilies, which would grow for us side by side, leaf overlapping leaf, till 
the Earth was white and red with them, if we cared to have it so. And 
Paradise was full of pleasant shades and fruitful avenues. Well: what 
hinders us from covering as much of the world as we like with pleasant shade 
and pure blossoms and goodly fruit? Who forbids its valleys to be covered 
with corn, till they laugh and sing? Who prevents its dark forests, ghostly 
and uninhabitable, from being changed into infinite orchards, wreathing the 
hills with frail-floretted snow, far away to the half-lighted horizon of April, 
and flushing the face of all the autumnal earth with glow of clustered food? 
But Paradise was a place of peace, we say, and all the animals were gentle 
servants to us. Well: the world would yet be a place of peace if we were all 
peacemakers, and gentle service should we have of its creatures if we gave 
them gentle mastery. But so long as we make sport of slaying bird and 
beast, so long as we choose to contend rather with our fellows than with our 
faults, and make battlefield of our meadows instead of pasture — so long truly, 
the Flaming Sword will still turn every way, and the gates of Eden remain 
barred close enough, till we have sheathed the sharper flame of our own pas- 
sions, and broken down the closer gates of our own hearts." 



56 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

beasts and plants, of birds and fishes, but their speech 
about this objective spectacle is childish, general, or 
simply the expressions of a grateful and delighted 
piety. There remains however a permissive convic- 
tion that in Christian dogmatics an indeterminate 
change in the organic creation universally as concerns 
the Earth, is postulated as a result of the Fall, while 
there may be more conclusively associated with the 
Creeds the assertion of an accentuated phenomenon of 
this sort, in a restricted area, known as the Garden of 
Eden, a primordial paradise. 

In the Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by John of 
Damascus, in the chapter ''Concerning Earth and its 
Products," we are told that ''indeed, before the trans- 
gression, all things were under his (man's) power. For 
God had set him as ruler over all things on the earth 
and in the waters. Even the serpent was accustomed 
to man, and approached him more readily than it did 
other living creatures, and held intercourse with him 
with delightful motions. And hence it was through it 
that the devil, the prince of evil made his most wicked 
suggestion to our first parents. Moreover the earth of 
its own accord used to yield fruits for the benefits of 
the animals that were obedient to man, and there was 
neither rain nor tempest on the earth. But after the 
transgression when he was compared with the unintelli- 
gent cattle and became like to them, after he had con- 
trived that in him irrational desire should have rule 
over reasoning mind and had become disobedient to the 
Master's command, the subject creation rose up against 
him whom the Creator appointed to be ruler." 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 57 

Here is disclosed perhaps no loss of any especial 
excellence in the animal or vegetable world but only an 
injured allegiance, a fracture in the preestablished 
comity between nature and man, which would entail 
the development of conflict, but in no important respect 
deface their physical charm, their aesthetic fascination. 

In a letter from Theophilus to Autolycus we read 
"but the things which were in Paradise were made of a 
superior loveliness and beauty, since in it the plants 
were said to have been planted by God. As to the rest 
of the plants, indeed the world contained plants like 
them, but the two trees — the tree of life and the tree of 
knowledge — the rest of the earth possessed not, but 
only Paradise," which again simply attributes a more 
glowing loveliness to the occupants of the strangely 
beautiful and mystical theatre, in which was enacted 
the tragedy of the Fall. 

Lactantius does in The Divine Institutes, intimate a 
reflected badness in the world in its pernicious creatures, 
saying "we must here reply to the philosophers, and 
especially to Cicero, who says 'Why should God, when 
He made all things on our account, make so large a 
quantity of snakes and vipers?'" and he finds, "since 
man is formed of different and opposing elements, soul 
and body, that is, heaven and earth, that which is 
slight and that which is perceptible to the senses, 
that which is eternal and that which is temporal, that 
which has sensibility and that which is senseless, that 
which is endued with light and that which is dark, 
reason itself and necessity require that both good and 
evil things should be set before man." 



58 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

But in no such sense as Man had fallen from his 
pristine glory, had the defacing poison of deterioration 
and decay affected the animate creation. So far as the 
Fall changed the relations of men to the natural world 
or the natural world to them, Novatian, in speaking of 
the Jewish Meats, says, ''the only food for the first men 
was fruit and the produce of the trees. For afterwards 
man's sin transferred his need from the fruit trees to 
the produce of the earth, when the very attitude of his 
body attested the condition of his conscience. For 
although innocency raised men up towards heavens to 
pluck their food from the trees so long as they had a 
good conscience, yet sin when committed bent men 
down to the earth, and to the ground to gather its grain. 
Moreover afterwards the use of the flesh was added, 
the divine favour supplying for human necessities the 
kinds of meats generally fitting for suitable occasions. 
For while a more tender meat was needed to nourish 
men who were both tender and unskilled, it was still a 
food not prepared without toil, doubtless for their 
advantage, lest they should again find a pleasure in 
sinning, if the labour imposed upon sin did not exhort 
innocence. And since now it was no more a paradise 
to be tended, but a whole world to be cultivated, the 
more robust food of flesh is offered to men, that for the 
advantage of culture something more might be added 
to the vigour of the human body." 

Novatian rebels against any imputation of unclean- 
ness to animals, as a reflexion impossible to consider 
upon God, His power and His honesty, and he continues 
in a strain of most curious imagination and symbolism : 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 59 

that "when it results that not only were the animals not 
condemned by their Creator because of his agency; but 
that men might be instructed in the brutes to return to 
the unspotted nature of their own creation, for we must 
consider how the Lord distinguishes clean and not 
clean. The creatures that are clean, it says, both chew 
the cud and divide the hoof, the unclean do neither, or 
only one of the two. All these things were made by 
one Workman, and He who them Himself blessed them 
is holy, and these things which were created are not in 
fault in being that which they were made. For it has 
never been customary for nature, but for a perverted 
will, to bear the blame of guilt. What then is the case? 
In the animals it is the characters and doings, and will 
of men that are depicted. They are clean if they chew 
the cud; that is, if they ever have in their mouths as 
food the divine precepts. They divide the hoof, if 
with the firm step of innocency they tread the ways of 
righteousness, and of every virtue of life. For of these 
creatures which divide the foot into two hoofs, the walk 
is always vigorous, the tendency to slip of one part of 
the hoof being sustained by the firmness of the other, 
and so retained in the substantial foot-step. 

"Then in the animals, by the law as it were, a certain 
mirror of human life is established, wherein men may 
consider the images of penalties; so that everything 
which is vicious in men, as committed against nature, 
may be the more condemned, when even these things, 
although naturally ordained in brutes, are in them 
blamed. For that in fishes the roughness of the scales 
is regarded as constituting their cleanness; roughened, 



60 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

rugged, and unpolished and substantial, and grave 
manners are approved in men; while those that are 
without scales are unclean; because trifling, and fickle 
and faithless, and effeminate manners are disapproved. 
Moreover what does the law mean when it says — Thou 
shalt not eat the camel? — except that by the example of 
that animal it condemns a life nerveless and crooked with 
crimes. Or when it forbids the swine to be taken for 
food? It assuredly reproves a life filthy and dirty, 
and delighting in the garbage of vice, placing its 
supreme good not in generosity of mind, but in the 
flesh alone. Or when it forbids the hare? It rebukes 
men deformed into women. And who would use the 
body of the weazel for food? But in this case it re- 
proves theft. Who would eat the lizard? But it 
hates an aimless waywardness of life. Who the eft? 
But it execrates mental strains. Who would eat the 
hawk, who the kite, who the eagle? But it hates 
plunderers and violent people who live by crime. Who 
the vulture? But it holds accursed those who seek for 
booty by the death of others. Or who the raven? But 
it holds accursed crafty wills. Moreover when it for- 
bids the sparrow it condemns intemperance, when the 
owl it hates those who fly from the light of truth; 
when the swan, the proud with high neck; when the 
sea-mew, too talkative an intemperance of tongue; 
when the bat, those who seek the darkness of night as 
well as of error. These things then, and the like to 
thesfe, the law holds accursed in animals, which in 
them indeed are not blameworthy, because they are 
born in this condition." It is evident here that the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 61 

writer while he may have conceded that a certain lapse 
in nature and natural products may have succeeded 
the Fall, or been its consequence, and that thereby a 
curious reflection of the imperfections of men was 
inserted in nature for their correction or admonishment 
still there is not implied any catastrophic subversion of 
nature, so that the aims and the qualities of its Creator 
are utterly hidden or distorted. And doubtless Nova- 
tian, as other authorities, regarded Eden as a restricted 
place, with its idyllic conditions limited to the enviable 
occupants alone of that beatific enclosure. 

Lactantius (On the Workmanship of God) says a 
great deal about the natural provisions in animals for 
their protection and successful propagation, and ani- 
madverts hopefully, and wisely too, upon man's 
apparent feebleness and helplessness at his entrance 
upon the world, but seems nowhere to depict any conse- 
quences to the natural world by reason of the Fall. 
His biology, if it can be so dignified, in this treatise is 
of course utterly crude. 

St. Augustine in his City of God, says ''but it is 
ridiculous to condemn the faults of beasts and trees 
and other such mortal and mutable things as are void of 
intelligence, sensation or life, even though these faults 
should destroy their corruptible nature; for these 
creatures received, at their creator's will, an existence 
fitting them, by passing away and giving place to 
others, to secure that lowest form of beauty, the beauty 
of seasons which in its own place is a requisite part of 
the world." 

Irenaeus in Against Heresies, speaks of clean and 



62 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

unclean beasts, but Tertullian emphasizes the "good" 
and "very good" in Genesis. Minucius FeHx in The 
Octavius offers this homage to animal intelligence — 
"how much more truly do the dumb animals naturally 
judge concerning your gods? Mice, swallows, kites, 
know that they have no feeling: they gnaw them, they 
trample them, they sit upon them; and unless you 
drive them off, they build their nests in the very mouth 
of your god. Spiders indeed weave their webs over his 
face, and suspend their threads from his very head." 

Origen in his contentions with Celsus had some diffi- 
culties with that opponent by reason of the latter's 
rather profuse naturalistic tendencies and illustrations, 
for Celsus claims that man is made as much for animals 
as animals for man, saying, "why were we not rather 
created on their account, since they hunt and devour 
us?" which Origen answers by averring the growth and 
development of understanding, how to cope with wild 
animals and subdue them or tame them, saying "yet 
what does it all avail to prove that in the beginning 
men were mostly captured and devoured by wild beasts, 
while wild beasts were never caught by men. For 
since the world was created in conformity with the will 
of Providence, and God presided over the universe of 
things, it was necessary that the elements of the human 
race should, at the commencement of its existence, be 
placed under some protection of the higher powers, so 
that there might be formed, from the beginning, a 
union of the divine nature with that of men* * * for it was 
probable that in the beginning of the world's existence 
human nature would be assisted to a greater degree 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 63 

(than afterwards), until progress had been made 
towards the attainment of understanding and the other 
virtues, and the invention of the arts, and they should 
thus be able to maintain life of themselves, and no 
longer stand in need of superintendents." 

Origen indeed regarded the description of Eden as 
allegorical, saying ''and the other statements which 
follow, which might of themselves lead a candid reader 
to see that all these things had not inappropriately an 
allegorical meaning," nor does he seem to attach the 
curse laid upon Adam to have reference generally to the 
other inhabitants of the earth, nor to have had any 
sensible influence on the contents of Creation. 

Certainly Luther casts no imputation on Nature, 
except Man's, by the Fall (See Hagenbach History of 
Doctrine), and though the emphasis laid by Protestant 
theologians upon the moral consequences of the Fall 
exceeds the seriousness of the view of the Roman 
Catholics — as in the opinion of these latter the Fall, 
''caused only the loss of the gifts of divine grace, the 
natural consequences of which are man's weakness and 
imperfection," — yet the Protestant authorities seem 
unwilling, or are unable, to impute much declination 
from its absolutely original state, as created, of the 
animal, the vegetable, the organic world. The point 
seems to be entirely to lay stress upon the degradation 
of Man, who by an inversion of essence was emptied of 
the superadded virtues or powers, which as a free gift 
God had bestowed upon him at first. Man lost power, 
splendor of parts and mind, while of course he ran 
violently into the courses of Sin, and contracted the 



64 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

disease of Death. The natural world was subjugated 
by him or to him (probably in any modern sense a most 
irrational guess) and when he fell he abdicated and lost 
his kingship (See Harnack's History of Dogma). 

It is certainly a bewildering maze of discussion to 
which one is introduced in following the intricacies and 
devious threads of interpretation, the luxuriant wilder- 
ness of fancies, hair-splitting definitions, and redundant 
phraseology which those who attempted to express 
"mysteries too great for words" struggled with, in 
forming Catholic or Christian creed. The effervescent 
imaginations of philosopher, poet, and mystic, mingled 
with erudition and not unmixed with nonsense, con- 
tributed to heterodoxy, heresy, and schism, and a very 
strong impression is gained from the whole matter that 
some sort of entrenched authority was a fierce necessity 
to keep the Christian faith reasonable and sane. As 
Ernest Myers says of Milton, the early fathers of 
theology made '*Man the central person of a drama of 
the action of Gods, involving the mightiest powers of 
Heaven and Hell." 

They did not dwell upon the possible effects of the 
Fall as obscuring God in the natural world. They had 
scant time, less inclination, and no knowledge to make 
much of a case out of it. Science could today make a 
better showing, with its formula of natural conditions 
as expressed in Jack London's words; the animal 
"must master or be mastered ; while to show mercy is a 
weakness; mercy does not exist in the primordial life; 
it is misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstanding 
makes for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, is 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 65 

the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of 
Time, the animal obeys.* * * The animal is a killer, a thing 
that preys, living on the things that live, unaided, alone, 
by virtue of his own strength and prowess surviving 
triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the 
strong survive. *** There is a patience of the wild — 
dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself — that holds 
motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the 
snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade: this 
patience belongs peculiarly to life when it hunts its 
living food." 

Such a view, the outcome of modern nature-study 
might have attracted St. Augustine's mind, as offering 
an exact and rational prolongation of the moral conse- 
quences of the Fall in the realm of nature. But as far 
as we know, nothing of the kind was insisted on by the 
Christian fathers and authorities. Cardinal Newman 
in his eloquent "Antony in Conflict," states that the 
early church ''conceived the devil to be allowed that 
power over certain brute animals which Scripture some- 
times assigns to him," and he adds "surely there is 
nothing abstractedly absurd in considering certain 
hideous developments of nature as tokens of the 
presence of the unseen author of evil, as soon as we 
once admit that he exists. Certainly the sight of a 
beast of prey, w4th his malevolent passions, savage 
cruelty, implacable rage, malice, cunning, sullenness, 
restlessness, brute hunger, irresistible strength, though 
there cannot be any sin in any of these qualities them- 
selves, awakens very awful and complicated musings in 
a religious mind. Thus a philosophical view of nature 



66 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

would be considered, in the times I speak of, to corro- 
borate the method of Scripture interpretation which 
those same times adopted." * 

On the other hand there is no counting the innumer- 
able illustrations of the enthusiasm of Christian authors 
over the beneficence and beauty of the world, and the 
illimitable reflections it suggests over the power and the 
goodness of God. Perhaps these effusions are more 
numerous among Protestants, or simply lay pietists 
than in the ranks of the Catholic essayists, and hence 
have no weight as expositions of the Christian idea, but 
they are by no means wanting in the latter. 

And to make the whole matter incontestable, affirm- 
ing for it the traditions of the Roman church, I find in 
this allocution to the Natural World, with all its 
appanages of living things, masonry of parts, and ex- 
quisite articulation, the exact adequate proof that in the 
theological sense of Christianity, whatever derange- 
ment the Animate Creation suffered by reason of the 
Fall, the attributes of God are therein still lucidly 
discerned. 

Cardinal John Edward Manning has written (Divine 
Grace over all the Earth); ''the whole world is the re- 
flection of the presence and of the perfection of God. 
The reason and the conscience, rightly exercised, can 
see and read His existence. His glory and His Godhead 

*Huxley observant of the sad moral disarray in the natural world has 
amusingly said "I apprehend that no one is seriously prepared to maintain 
that the ghosts of all the myriads of generations of herbivorous animals which 
lived during the millions of years of the earth's duration, before the appear- 
ance of man, and which have all that time been tormented and devoured by 
carnivores, are to be compensated by a perennial existence in clover: while 
the ghosts of carnivores are to go to some kennel where there is neither a pan 
of water nor a bone with any meat on it." 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 67 

in the works of His hands. Again, the Psalmist says, 
speaking of God ; 'He hath set His tabernacle in the sun ; 
and again, He cometh forth out of the ends of heaven, 
and His circuit goeth to the end thereof again.* There 
is no one that can hide himself from the heat thereof. 
That is the glory, and the majesty, and the love of God, 
fill the whole world, pervade all things, all men are en- 
compassed by it. No man can hide himself from the 
love and from the glory of God. Go where he may, if 
he walk upon the earth, God is there; if he ascend into 
heaven. He is there before him. Every living soul 
therefore has an illumination of God in the order of 
nature, by the light of conscience, and by the light of 
reason, and by the working of the Spirit of God in his 
head and in his heart." 

And has not the Catholic service retained the Bene- 
dicite omnia opera Domini, the Coeli enarrant, Domini 
est terra, Laudate Dominum, out of the Psalms of David 
as poems of adoration in which the singer's fervor 
grows from the depth of his delight, the leaping joy of 
his love for the beautiful earth, and its enlivening 
progenies? 

So we may now pass without misgivings, that in such 
an inquiry we are gainsaying the assent of the theologi- 
cal faculties, to the important investigation how far 
the world as a product of a Creator's will, and mind and 
desire, furnishes us with evidence that He is susceptible 
to our cry for light, and our incessant bewildering 
clamor, whether He exists or not. We should not 
deny ourselves any hopes that this evidence affords, 
but with every mortal expedient and in some universal 



68 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

and concerted manner, present them in an appeal, of 
such convincing force, that He, whose possession of 
reason and compassion, we believe it can be shown the 
Earth demonstrates, must as a logical necessity of his 
own nature answer, or else — shall we be compelled to 
say HE EXISTS NOT. 

And in so far as this experiment is underlaid by the 
Christian hypothesis — to which we obediently assent — 
and in all its phases, its antecedents, methods and 
results, involves the Christian sentiment, Christian 
utilities, and Christian imagery, it will be also a proof of 
the Christian position itself. 

The treatment accorded to the doctrine of The Fall, 
in a portion of the foregoing pages, might appear deserv- 
ing only of sarcastic comment. But as a contribution 
to the Aryan myth making element of religion, con- 
sidered so important by Mr. Chamberlain (Founda- 
tions of the Nineteenth Century), it is entitled to 
consideration and serious analysis, along the lines of 
theological deduction, as respects the Natural World, 
precisely as we have treated it here. Chamberlain 
regards the myth making power of the race distinctively 
as an element of religious beauty, and contrasts the 
mytho-poetic tendency with the dogma-enslaving prac- 
tice of what he calls **the specifically Roman dogma- 
mongering." 

A paragraph of Mr. Chamberlain's perhaps eluci- 
dates the sort of dignity he attributes to this theme. 
'*In the twenty-ninth chapter of his book On Prayer, 
Origines speaks of the myth of the Fall of Man, and 
makes the remark: 'We cannot help observing that the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 69 

credulity and inconstancy of Eve did not begin at the 
moment when she disregarded the word of God and 
listened to the serpent, they were manifestly present 
before, and the serpent came to her, because in its 
cunning it had already noticed her weakness.' With 
this one sentence the myth — which the Jews, as 
Renan rightly remarked, compressed into a dry histori- 
cal fact — is once more awakened to life. And with the 
myth, nature slips into its rights. That which may be 
called sin, as soon as we aim at something higher, be- 
longs to us as Paul had already said, 'by nature'; 
with the fetters of the chronicle we throw off the fetters 
of credulous superstition, we no longer stand opposed to 
all nature as something strange, something that has 
been born higher but has fallen lower, we rather belong 
to nature, and we cast back upon it the light of grace 
that fell into our human heart. By carrying on the 
Pauline thought Origines here liberated science and at 
the same time pushed back the bolt that shut the heart 
to true, direct religion." 

Therefore as a purely metaphysical ratiocination a 
research into the official views of Christianity as to the 
obscuring effects by such a Fall of the evidences of 
God's presence in Nature, was reasonable, even though, 
considered as a practical, so to say naturalistic question, 
it only becomes a piece of absurd erudition. Our 
contention was simple enough. Is God open to the 
approaches of emotion and reason, uniting in a request 
of momentous import, to His supplicants? The organi- 
zation and expression of the World permit us to think 
so. But inasmuch as we are entering the whole ques- 



70 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

tion on the basis of Christian propositions or funda- 
mentals, did the Fall affect the visible world to such an 
extent as to forbid these otherwise natural inferences? 
The authorities do not seem to think so. We were 
then justified to repeat our confidence in the assurances 
the Natural World appears to offer of God's accessi- 
bility in such a matter. 



CHAPTER III 
A Silent or a Speaking God (Continued) 

In looking at the world as the purposive work of a 
Creator, there are apparent in it two prominent char- 
acters which we emphasize as indicating qualities in its 
Maker, favorable for our ends. These are order and 
beauty. The reign of Law and the aesthetic expression 
of Nature. It would hardly seem necessary to relate 
these at any length, and yet their significance is not 
fully appreciated, as bearing out our contention, with- 
out a few illustrative examples wherein the vagueness 
of a general and diffused statement gains distinctness 
from a concrete instance. 

And in the first place if we consider the universality 
of Law in the Universe, how from top to bottom its 
inexorable fiats prohibit chance, determine process, 
controlling the play of nebulae and the biological his- 
tory of an ascidian, we are at first plunged into a 
humility and an abjectness of wonder before the im- 
mensity of a Mind that conceived or inaugurated so 
terrific and august a result. On any a priori grounds 
it seems difficult to think that such a Creator would 
belittle or vulgarize His eminence by stooping to our 
needs. We do indeed seem a little different from the 
rest of the animal world at least, and we do seem to be 
in a measure free to choose; exceptionable aspects of 
ourselves which might induce for us some leniency of 



72 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

consideration at His hands. Yet on the other hand we 
are in our attributes not separated by much from the 
mammaHa of which we are ordinally a family, and in all 
respects we are forlornly feeble, dependent, and perish- 
able. The splendid tyranny of Law ruling exquisitely 
in all the minutest phenomena of matter, and keeping 
together in the whole cosmic sweep of its coercion the 
hosts of heaven, speaks of a Designer, who must be, by 
all ordinary tokens, infinitely removed from us, our 
conceptions, our understanding, our nature. 

Our aspirations, let them run ever so high, our 
achievements though they imprison some infinitesimal 
element of natural force, our reason though it dissolves 
a portion of the obscurity around us, still leave us 
powerless in action, failing to free us from the ignominy 
of being simply experimentalists, watchers, itinerant 
observers of a domain we occupy by sufferance, from 
which we disappear by disease. Now as a matter of 
fact Christianity relieves this situation by bringing its 
retinue of homiletics by which it affirms that we are 
not only the recipients of a Revelation but the justifica- 
tion of Creation. 

In the twinkling of a moment our former modesty is 
replaced by a not unconscious boastfulness, by an 
assumed suzerainty which, as things are now, something 
more than the documents of Christianity must either 
bolster up or banish. It is this ''something more" we 
are here in search of, but we are in search of it on the 
grounds of the Christian hypothesis, and because of it. 
If in this book we are planning a great experimental 
demand, worked out on a colossal scale, that God again 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 73 

declare Himself, it is because in the first place Christi- 
anity asserts His existence, and furthermore asserts that 
we are objects of His attention and in the second place 
that we are overwhelmingly in need of such a declara- 
tion, and that the Maker of a Law-controlled world 
proclaims in that Law — His own institution — that He is 
open to reason. 

Observe we could not see acquiescence in the plan we 
propose except from Christian believers who assume 
God's care for us, and we might without troubling 
ourselves with further argument as to the implications 
of the Law and Beauty of the world, simply ask them 
to inaugurate the experiment we have designed, on the 
grounds of the tenets they profess. But then we 
should run the risk of too prejudiced an answer to our 
petition. We would be told that our experiment is an 
impertinence, if not a profanity, the parable of Dives 
and Lazarus would be repeated, with its injunction 
''though one rise from the dead," our attitude would 
be denounced as meddlesome and unnecessary, we 
should be told to have faith and wait. But if we can 
claim on grounds outside of Revelation, that the Maker 
of the world of Law must be ipso facto supremely sensi- 
tive to reason, then on broader grounds than the limita- 
tions, or, the misinterpretations of Revelation, we are 
entitled to ask Christians, and to expect them, to put 
that reason to the test. This is our procedure. 

Now as to Law proving the reasonableness of God. 
The Creator of a Universe ordered and run by law at 
every point and process of its economy is in analogy, 
at an incomparable distance, with the inventor who 



74 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

makes a machine whose whole movement is governed 
exactly by the form and relation of its parts. The 
perfection of a great reciprocating engine with all its 
separate elements in perfect control is a law-regulated 
structure, and the mind — we were almost willing to 
assert the temperament of — its author obtains a coinci- 
dent illustration in the mind of a Creator of a Universe, 
all of whose aspects bend to the dominion of law. 
Why? Both of these organisms are designs, that move 
in one way, and one way only, and accomplish one 
result. They are comprehensive conceptions which in 
the minds of their inventors dwell as ideas, seen in all 
their shifting phases, as they operate and display their 
inevitable physical consequences. The foreordained 
harmony of parts produces a number of lesser and 
greater movements in both, which are so regulated, so 
cooperative, that the combination issues successfully in 
a predestined upshot or conclusion. 

It is not dissonant with this statement that the 
machine of its human author may have been an experi- 
mental result, the crowning achievement of a line of 
rudimentary machines which started by similar minds 
in the past have culminated in the supreme example 
today, in a process of mental evolution inseparable 
from the foiled and limping progress of human work. 
Nor further is it dissonant with this statement that the 
machine exemplifies in its construction and operation 
laws previously imposed upon the universe. The 
point of emphasis, and it can be made emphatic, in spite 
of the affected disdain for the old time comparison 
of the watch-maker and the creator of a world, is this. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 75 

We are not engaged in establishing the proof of de- 
sign in the universe from the Paley argument of a 
design in a machine, but insisting on the psychological 
identity of a creator, who creates a world — this is the 
Christian dogma — and the man who constructs a 
mechanism, functioning throughout a nexus of related 
parts to one end, which is accurately realized. In 
both there is an ideal. It may not be completely real- 
ized; some observers believe the world could have 
been improved, even in its mechanical and physical 
adjustments. With both there is a reasonable control 
of the material involved in construction. And when 
the object of thought is finished there is in both appre- 
ciation of its excellence, and a thorough-going under- 
standing of its action, its management, and its correc- 
tion. 

It is this illuminated state of the mind that we dis- 
cover to be a crowning feature in the inventor and 
creator, and it accompanies — if our claim of an analogy 
is correct — a certain characteristic genial readiness to 
explain, to elucidate, to furnish the doubter, the 
inquirer — if the doubt and the inquiry are sincere and 
intelligent and persistent — an explanation. This con- 
dition of mind is inevitable, it is psychologic. It is 
based primarily on necessity. 

It is inconceivable that a rational agent working 
through its own resources of thought and invention and 
of course working to attain desirable ends on its com- 
pletion of a design could be animated by any other 
wishes than to demonstrate and distinguish and define 
the latter's action, its powers, and its construction. 



76 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

Of course we are speaking of abstract and absolutely 
disenfranchised free, noble states of intention. The 
machine thus created is understood not to be a trick, a 
substitution, is not made for market purposes to out- 
wit rivals, or to secure fraudulent deceitful results. It 
is a purely intellectual effort. As such its author 
remains unreservedly and delightedly its delineator, 
its expositor, and promulgator. 

The affectations of mystery, the shroud of conceal- 
ment for the purpose of his supposititious aggrandize- 
ment, an obscurity intended to give him an irrelevant 
and foolish importance, are foreign and fatal to his 
mental eminence, to the freedom of his will and his self 
respect, are utterly inconsistent with the loftiness of 
his ideals. He works in an unvitiated ether of concep- 
tions. Still there is a limital virtue to his generous 
impulses. He demands reciprocal intelligence. He 
asks for some conditioned evenness of mind in his 
audience. If the fabric he has formed demands justifi- 
cation, is an affirmation of mind that challenges other 
minds for their homage of admiration and endorsement, 
its explanation can only legitimately be forced from 
him by those ardent enough, and qualified, to com- 
prehend it. He must be mute before those who 
cannot understand, who mistake his words, or are 
dumbfounded and simply opaque before his expo- 
sitions. 

It would be preposterous for instance to ask Dr. 
Paul R. Heyl to define in words his remarkable recent 
demonstration of the speed of ultra-violet light waves 
in vacuum before an audience of Russian moujiks, just 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 77 

as it would be useless for any practical ends of edifica- 
tion, to explain to children Prof. Pupin's system for the 
reinforcement of telephone transmission. 

But still the inventor, the creator must in essence 
crave recognition, the very innateness of his self- 
expression secures its satisfaction through its intel- 
lectual reception by others. Amongst imperfect men 
and women less creditable motives intervene, and con- 
taminate the original pure impulse of mental joy before 
a good result, an intentioned response to thought. We 
know what they are, vanity, ambition, conceit, gain, 
flattery, promotion, etc., a string of motives in- 
separable from our human life. This does not hide 
the ultimate inevitableness of the mind's exultation 
in sympathy. 

And now further. On this earth almost all human 
inventions serve a human purpose, their usufruct 
means more happiness or more knowledge, their makers 
are forever crowned with human gratitude, they are 
steps in human progress, and they linger in an atmos- 
phere of benevolence. The most abstruse scientific 
device is a contribution to knowledge and forever marks 
a new enclosure of understanding, and the industrial 
engines suddenly develop immense possibilities of living. 
They each are benefactions. They can only be con- 
strued as benignities of genius. Now the attitude to 
them as such of the inventor or the creator, is suffused 
with generous emotion. He delights, to the inquiring 
gaze, to make clear their features, to accentuate their 
work, their utility, to recount their history, their 
development, their implications; each new question. 



78 THE WORLD^S PRAYER 

earnestly made, starts reminiscent associations, and 
the inventive mind dwells with recurrent emphasis on 
the principles, the details, and the products of his 
thoughtful work. In short in the inventor we see a 
nature spurred on to the declaration of its own activity 
and incorrigibly responsive to the scrutiny and appeal 
of those of its own nature, as to the meaning and genius 
of its work. 

Now according to the Christian hypothesis — upon 
which this whole suggestion rests, — God created the 
universe, and at any rate this particular portion in 
which we find ourselves, in which, as Mivart says, 
"amongst the multitude of mineral, and especially of 
crystalline species which compose it, most definite and 
ceaseless order reigns," and wherein also in all its life 
manifestations a vast process of organic evolution rules 
with tyrannous power. It is a stupendous aggregate 
of systems within systems, running on its huge and co- 
eternal course without stoppage and without error, and 
with a certain terrifying monotony like the ceaseless 
and calculable movements of a Corliss engine. If so, 
the mental attributes we have spent a little time in 
describing above, also adhere to its author. We are 
led the more to this postulation as the Christian church 
affirms as its most copious text of consolation to its 
adherents God's interest in us, His woefully smaller and 
yet congenial simulacra. 

And it can be no longer assumed that our state of 
knowledge, our rudimentary and self-satisfied ignor- 
ance, the sort of thing which stood for knowledge some 
centuries ago, prohibits us from offering a most intelli- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 79 

gent, respectful, and sympathetic hearing, if the Creator, 
the inventor of this wonderful cosmos, listening to our 
petitions, not querulous, nor sobbing, nor stupid, nor 
minatory, but devout and earnest, will announce some- 
thing that will make it clearer; if He will at least 
promulgate Himself diS its CAUSE. For, as it happens 
in this case, we are not so much in darkness as to the 
mechanism and movements of the machine, as we are 
to its origin. We are also involved in the "going" of 
this vast engine, and Our Predicament, stated in the 
first chapter, is sincere since while ourselves in the 
design, our position is critical and inquisitive, as if some 
springs in a great machine were at times sufficiently 
freed from the operations of the machine, of which 
they were integral parts, to ask ''why are we here and 
who did it and are we likely to remain here until the 
machine breaks down and that ends it, and TJsy 

In the illustration enforced above, as to the natural 
desire of the inventor to elucidate his machine or inven- 
tion as a mental satisfaction inseparable from the 
mental workings of his own brain we regarded himself 
and his audience as outside of the machine, as the 
machine as an object to them both before which they 
stood as disinterested observers. But in the case of the 
world and our reasonable needs of explanation from its 
Creator, we are entangled in the machine itself; we are 
a part of it and while involved in its relentless opera- 
tions are yet permitted to become, partially at least, 
its interpreters and as actual spectators are watching 
its movements as tangible results beyond us, and in 
their scrutiny have become eagerly importunate to 



80 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

know more as to their origin, their meanings, and their 
end. Now it would seem that the wilHngness, the 
esoteric hunger of the inventor to display the perfection 
of his machine to sympathetic receptive minds, would 
become an emotional craving almost, if actually por- 
tions of that machine were conscious and responsive 
units. The motive with him to explain, in their case, 
would incorporate the mental satisfaction and the 
sentiment of compassionate regard, of moral obliga- 
tion, as well, and sensibly thereby take on a coercive 
power which would move him to very explicit and 
informing council. 

At this point enters a distracting and important 
consideration viz. the imperfection of the machine. 
Here we awaken a different series of motives and emo- 
tions, which might very much modify the previous 
energies of communication between the inventor and 
his audience either outside or inside the machine. 
Humanly speaking it is a matter of extreme mortifica- 
tion to confess a defeated purpose; it is the most un- 
pleasant of all tasks to be compelled to advertise and 
make clear the particular blunders of conception, or of 
construction which invalidate the workmanship we 
expected to advance, as a miracle of excellence. And 
perhaps, we may advertently remark, it is the more 
disagreeable as the reputation of the inventor is high. 
At once there emerge reasons for silence, though it 
could be insisted the reasons were discreditable or 
cowardly. But to most men the reasons for silence are 
right, as the inventor may intend to learn from experi- 
ence and failure to improve his workmanship, and. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 81 

before confessing failure, he prepares for a more suc- 
cessful venture. 

Do we find some reflection of this state of things in 
the world? in God? On the Christian assumptions — 
and we stick to them — it is incredible, impossible, a 
strange vagary of impertinence and profanity so to 
speak or think. And yet. This earth, wonderful in a 
thousand ways, immensely interesting in all its physi- 
cal aspects, furnishing mental pabulum to the omnivor- 
ous curiosity of men, fascinating as a dream in its 
history, and enriching poetry, fable, romance, philoso- 
phy, with the diverse threads of its phenomena; this 
world as a moral spectacle, indeed as a spiritual 
spectacle, is defective. This is certainly obvious. And 
why? There is but one answer. Again the Christian 
polemic. It is Sin. Defacement enters with it and 
stays with it. The machine divinely made, cannot be 
accorded the note of supremacy, it is marred somehow, 
and in its highest realms of action is faulty. Does this 
violation of what should have been a perfect work 
embarrass its Creator, or persuade Him to refuse us the 
more definite revelation we seem now to desire? Has 
the disappointment issued in our permanent obscurity? 
Or will the powerful process of evolution work a 
metamorphosis, or a new creation, wherein the errors 
will be remedied and God, exonerated by a new experi- 
ment, appear luminously before the eyes of men? 

These are fruitless questions. They need not be 
made. For our purpose God — following the Christian 
creed — has accepted the authorship of the universe; 
an explanation — allegorical or real — has been revealed, 



82 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

but today under the influence of illumination and 
science, the thought of the age asks for a reiteration and 
an explanation more commensurate with our intelli- 
gence and expectation. The very misdirection of so 
vast and wonderful a universe is itself a baffling mystery 
and inasmuch as it comprehends all lesser and deter- 
mined phases of device, as the life of plants and ani- 
mals, the rise and decline of geological ages, the birth 
of planets, the questions we ask, finally land us before 
the ultimate ones IS THERE A GOD? HOW WAS 
THE WORLD MADE? WHAT IS ITS MEANING? 
WHAT ARE WE? WHENCE? WHITHER? 
WHY? Returning to our simile of the human inventor, 
this mortal author, if by some chance he had started a 
machine which possessed the aptitude to run for many 
years without stopping, and if, leaving it in some unin- 
habited region, he had watched from a distance, or in 
some sort of disguise, the wondering approach of men 
and women around it; if the numbers of these by 
settlement increased, and if the anomalous and marvel- 
lous machine, still doing its work uninterruptedly, con- 
tinued to awaken their amazement and queries, with 
regard to itself, its origin, and its author; if further 
innumerable and very clever guesses had been ventured, 
and the growing population around the humming and 
tireless machine fell into more or less bitter wrangles 
over it, would he not be impelled — unless actuated by 
mere drollery or a proud exclusive disdain — by the 
motives above rehearsed, and by his sympathy to come 
forward and acknowledge his work, make it clear, and 
exhibit its purpose? We certainly believe he would, 
and it is a psychological error to say he would not. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER S3 

All of the foregoing considerations are intended to 
assert the reasonableness of the inventor or the creator 
of a great well contrived — even if in some respects 
imperfect — machine, whose intrinsic wonderfulness 
gives glory to its inventor, and extorts admiration from 
its students, and that reasonableness, as a logical conse- 
quence, makes him also ideally communicative. The 
objection might be made w4th reference to drawing any 
parallel between this human inventor and God that the 
inventor and his audience are both the same sort of 
beings, while God is an ''intelligence not only beyond 
all our possible powers of imagination, but beyond all 
human conception" (Mivart). To which the obvious 
answer is, that on the terms and the allegations of the 
Christian revelation — and we are going by that — "God 
said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: 
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, 
and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and 
over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that 
creepeth upon the earth. 

*'So God created man in His own image; in the image 
of God created He him; male and female created He 
them." After that all analogies drawn from human 
antecedents and conduct, must have an accredited 
weight. Before now passing to the contemplation of 
the beauty of the world as inducing a belief, nay a proof, 
of the powers of compassion in God, let us for a moment 
regard the organization of the world or the universe as 
the counterpart of a machine. 

A machine means a motor, a combination of parts 
moving harmoniously and reciprocally together, and 



84 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

work done. As Prof. Vinton has defined them there 
are machines destined to exercise great pressure, and 
others to entertain movement. The former are illus- 
trated in the wedge and the lever, but in their operation 
there must be motion although of a restricted and, so 
to speak, a stationary nature, with the consequent 
emergence of pressure. Usually we associate the idea 
of a machine with motion and work, and the motion 
has to do with the transference of heavy bodies from 
one point to another. Again there is Carnot's ideal 
''reversible" heat engine, wherein — assuming the in- 
destructibility of Heat — an engine ' 'which converts a 
certain quantity of the heat spent upon it into work, 
lets the rest down from the boiler to the condenser, and 
spends upon it the same amount of work with the 
result of taking back the heat of the condenser, adding 
thereto the heat-equivalent of the work so spent, and 
thus restoring the whole of its original loss in heat to 
the boiler." 

Regarded in these physical terms we are told (The 
Unseen Universe; Stewart and Tait) that the "visible 
universe may with perfect truth be compared to a vast 
heat-engine; the sun is the furnace or source of high- 
temperature-heat of our system, just as the stars are 
for other systems, and the energy which is essential to 
our existence is derived from the heat which the sun 
radiates, and represents only an excessively minute 
portion of that heat. ' ' This heat-engine of the universe 
runs down, as is now a familiar speculation, unless the 
new substance Radium with its incomparable powers of 
self-support will indefinitely prolong its life. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 85 

It is not however so much to a technical engine 
abstractly considered, that we wish to compare the 
world. It is in the more generalized sense as a composi- 
tion of parts, an harmonious movement, and an effec- 
tive work-producing organ, that we pause an instant to 
regard it. 

Its motion is at first the most stupendous and obvious 
fact. That motion gives the night and the day, the 
seasons, and induces a universal distribution of life 
over its surface. It is a regulated motion, and the 
path the round earth describes, in its revolution about 
the sun, is a fixed one. This motion is participated in by 
the other elements of our solar system, and their centre 
of revolution like the earth's, is the sun, while they also 
partake of an axial change like the earth's. Viewed in 
the mass this presents a distinctly machine-like effect, 
in which the passive resistances — friction and shock — 
are reduced to a minimum, indeed seem almost absent, 
so that the result appears perpetual. It has remarkable 
symmetry, and acts and reacts with automatic and 
beautiful precision. The work done consists in the 
translation of the enormous bulks represented in the 
combined mass of all the planets. If this combina- 
tion is studied more closely we discover that a repeti- 
tion of the underlying scheme is repeated on a smaller 
scale in the planets themselves, in so far as they also 
have assembled about them lesser tributary satellites, 
governed also by unfailing rectitude of motion. 

When we pass to the surface of the earth itself, we 
find a relativity of action which while for the most part 
involved in fostering life, still confirms our first impres- 



86 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

sion of a machine less mechanically interpreted. We 
find in the first place a regulated exchange of the 
water from the surface of the earth to the skies and its 
return, this producing clouds, blankets of mist, and 
an aerial humidity, by which the heat of the earth is 
conserved, while constant precipitations minister to 
the growth of its plant and animal inhabitants. This 
hydraulic engine, as it might be called, discharges its 
functions perfectly — ^its motor force being the heat of 
the sun — and performs an incalculable amount of work. 

We discover next an atmosphere delicately balanced 
for the respiration of oxygen-consuming organisms, 
which balance, by a most discrete device, is held in 
equipoise through the reciprocating action of animals 
and plants, the animals avoiding carbonic anhydride 
gas, which is a food for the plants, who in their digestion 
return the oxygen to the progressively exhausted air, 
and thus keep replenished the supply of oxygen for the 
animals. This equipoise is again an example of a 
machine-like reciprocation, and the volume of air is kept 
in motion through winds, tempests and currents, set 
agoing by the sun's heat. 

We see covering the earth at every point, and adapted 
for their contrasted habitats, animals and plants, each 
one of which can be readily classified as a machine, but 
whose interaction is a compact chain of metamorphoses, 
whereby an enormous colossal life-engine is undeviat- 
ingly and uninterruptedly kept in motion. The plants 
feed the animals, supplying the fuel for their combus- 
tion processes in which life with a retinue of machine- 
like sequences is concerned ; the animals feed the plants 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 87 

mostly by the exhalation of the carbonic anhydride 
gas, partly by defecation and decay — the sum total of 
returned material equalling the sum total of consump- 
tion, very nearly — and the series of phases is complete. 
Theoretically and originally the machine was ideal and 
self-compensating, but the human tribe, who are part 
of the machine, and yet its percipients, have developed 
a psychic life, which eventuating in something called 
civilization, have not only disordered the balance — - 
though the disorder up to the present time is inappreci- 
able — but now by the strangest paradox ever witnessed 
in machine construction, have become inquisitors of 
the machine of which they are a part, and ask who made 
it and why they are in it. 

Were we more intently to peruse the stages of organic 
evolution, and enumerate, as Wallace says "the numer- 
ous complex and delicate adaptations of inorganic 
nature, without which it is impossible for life either to 
exist now or to have been developed during the im- 
measurable past," we should come before a mecha- 
nism of checks and controls, motors and movements, 
which, although developmental in character, could be 
referred appropriately to the conception of a machine, 
as consisting of the harmonious working of related and 
invaginated parts, and as doing work. 

One of the elements that has been concerned in a 
portion of that work is the tides, which in their flux 
and reflux, in their translation of the superficial masses 
of the oceans over and up and down upon the surface 
of the earth present the rhythm of the alternating 
advance and retreat of a mechanical surface. 



88 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

In the domain of chemistry, in the new and startling 
light thrown upon the constitution of matter, we en- 
counter a wholly marvellous mechanical system in the 
atom. As Fleeming Jenkins has written (quoted by 
Sir William Thomson) "the existence of the chemical 
atom, already quite a complex little world seems very 
probable; and the description of the Lucretian atom is 
wonderfully applicable to it. We are not wholly with- 
out hope that the real magnitude of each such atom 
may some day be known — not merely relative weight 
of the several atoms, but the number in a given volume 
of any material ; that the form and motion of the parts 
of each atom and the distances by which they are sep- 
arated may be calculated : that the motions by which 
they produce heat, electricity and light may be illus- 
trated by exact geometrical diagrams: and that the 
fundamental properties of the intermediate and possibly 
constituent medium may be arrived at. Then the 
motion of planets and the music of the spheres will be 
neglected for a while in admiration of the maze in 
which the tiny atoms run." 

It has been reserved for the great Swedish chemist, 
Arrhenius, to propound a majestic theory, as to the 
systole and diastole of the whole universe, which 
establishes a comparison of it to the alternate expan- 
sions and contractions of a steam motor. The slow 
retardation of movement in the orbital motion of the 
planets of our system contracts their paths, and they 
slowly draw near to the centre of the system. With 
accelerated velocity they sweep across space and 
finally the whole system collapses, through stages of 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 89 

increasing violence and disruption; planet after 
planet plunges into the vortex of the consuming sun. 
With every fresh arrival the sun's mass is enlarged, and 
such stupendous thermal additions made that the yet 
inviolate orbs respond to its terrific impact and gain 
themselves enormously in heat. The course of the 
planetary tragedy terminates when the last world 
enters the nebulous glory that then extends outward 
to the limits of the former solar system, now lost in this 
intense revolution. The huge conglomerate revolves 
with increasing energy and another cycle of world 
evolution begins, as it throws off satellites which repeat 
the ageless processes which have made our system as we 
know it today. The tireless forces of nature resume 
their creative work, and matter or mind, with limitless 
industry starts afresh the endless dance of phenomena. 
And so imagination tries to trace, in cycle after cycle, 
the chain of absorptions and evolutions in a cosmic 
drama incessantly repetitive and infinitely continuous. 
Its sublime invariability freezes the heart, and leaves 
the mind abjectly helpless: 

Where Time and weary Space 
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing 
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being — 
Blank Space, and scytheless Time with brawny hands 
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands. 
Not mar'd by flit of shades — unmeaning they 
As moonlight on the dial of the day! 

We have so far been regarding the God-Creator and 
the man-inventor as analogous, in so far as they need to 
explain their respective masterpieces to appreciative 



90 THE WORLD^S PRAYER 

spirits or receptive minds, and an intellectual necessity 
would coerce both, under the conditions of inquiry, 
earnestly and thoughtfully made, to do so. This view 
estimates solely the mental factors in the relation of the 
creator or the inventor to his work, and the imperious 
call his own understanding of his device incessantly 
makes for sympathy in coordinated minds. This so 
far is perfectly well illustrated in human affairs, when 
we find associations of all kinds organized for the very 
purpose of affording congenial opportunities for men to 
advertise and explain their discoveries or inventions. 

We now leave the human inventor, and turn to the 
higher task of postulating compassion or kindliness in 
the God-Creator, who, possibly absolved from the need 
of intellectual recognition in His work, must, on the 
generous grounds of interest or commiseration, bend 
towards our supplication for enlightenment; and this 
quality we believe shown in the beauty of the world, 
which — so say the Christian faculties — He created or 
made. 

Nothing is perhaps more evident about this world 
itself or the retinue of firmamental lights by which it is 
accompanied than its beauty. Long before we appre- 
ciate the deductions of astronomy, our eyes have 
dwelt with wonder and fascination on the panorama of 
the skies at night when Night's hemisphere had veiled 
the horizon round. Peak and mountain side, vale and 
forested summit, "green field, and glowing rock and 
glancing streamlet," were observed by us with delight 
long before the geologist or the topographic engineer, 
had traced their causes, and fed our curiosity with an 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 91 

exact delineation of their historic evolution. As we 
listen to Ruskin in the following paragraph we are not 
much troubled by scientific interrogations, nor do we 
exactly care how carefully they may unravel the se- 
quence of physical events, which formed the scene we 
have thus nobly described; 

"The mountain paths stoop to these glens in forky 
zigzags, leading to some grey and narrow arch, all 
fringed under its shuddering curve with the ferns that 
fear the light; a cross of rough-hewn pine, iron-bound 
to its parapet, standing dark against the lurid fury of 
the foam. Far up the glen, as we pause beside the 
cross, the sky is seen through the openings in the pines, 
thin with excess of light; and in its clear consuming 
flame of white space, the summits of the rocky moun- 
tains are gathered into solemn crowns and circlets, all 
flushed in that strange, faint silence of possession by 
the sunshine which has in it so deep a melancholy; 
full of power, yet as frail as shadows; lifeless, like the 
walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in tender falls of 
crimson folds, like the veil of some sea spirit, that 
lives and dies as the foam flashes; fixed on a perpetual 
throne, stern against all strength, lifted above all 
sorrow, and yet effaced and melted utterly into the air 
by that last sunbeam that has crossed to them from 
between the two golden clouds." 

When we look upon 

"Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, 
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass green emeralds, 
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, 
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price, 



92 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

As one of them, indifferently rated, 
And of a carat of this quantity, 
May serve in peril of calamity 
To ransom great kings from captivity" ; 

we are not likely to esteem them more or less for knowing 
something about their composition, their crystallog- 
raphy, or their occurrence. In the glory of their glow we 
find absorption, that turns aside all simply technical 
knowing about them. And long before the systems of 
botanists and the terminology of morphologists had made 
us acquainted with the relations of plants and trees, had 
not nature with all her armory of green and blossoming 
things made us captive to her overmastering beauty. 

And call the vales, and bid them hither cast 

Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues. 

Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use 

Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, 

On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks, 

Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes. 

That on the green turf suck the honey'd showers, 

And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. 

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, 

The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine. 

The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet. 

The glowing violet. 

The musk-rose, and the well attired woodbine. 

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, 

And every flower that sad embroidery wears: 

Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, 

And daffodillies fill their cups with tears. 

Whatever message the world brings to us of its 
creator, its beauty more instantly engages our atten- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 93 

tions, and proving the mainspring of our song, is re- 
flected in our whole Hfe with instantaneous homage. 

Perhaps few men have felt the natural beauty of the 
world more deeply than Ruskin, who has painted in 
words its mystery, and responded in his heart and spirit 
to its higher revelations of purpose. Now this philoso- 
pher has written (Modern Painters) **and so, though we 
were to regard the pleasures of sight merely as the 
highest of sensual pleasures, and though they were of 
rare occurrence, and when occurring, isolated and im- 
perfect, there would still be a supernatural character 
about them, owing to their permanence and self- 
sufficiency, where no other sensual pleasures are 
permanent or self-sufficient. But when, instead of 
being scattered, interrupted, or chance distrib- 
uted, they are gathered together, and so arranged to 
enhance each other as by chance they could not be, 
there is caused by them not only a feeling of strong 
affection towards the object in which they exist, but a 
perception of purpose and adaptation of it to our desires; 
a perception, therefore, of the immediate operation of 
the Intelligence which so formed us, and so feeds 
us. 

**Out of which perception arise joy, admiration, and 
gratitude y All of which if fully accepted confesses at 
once to the merciful regard for his creatures of the 
Creator. But we beg to be more circumstantial, 
understanding how serenely with an uncompromising 
and profoundly poetic depth of faith Ruskin made 
God real, in the world in which he (Ruskin) moved 
with such high-minded and illuminating piety. 



94 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

That the earth and the universe are beautiful ; the 
latter in a remote and mind stirring way only, is un- 
questioned; but we are engaged in no purely didactic 
assumptions; does this beauty allow us to believe or 
assert the compassionate nature of its maker? And 
again we recur to analogy. What are the tempera- 
ments of the makers of beauty in this world? And 
just here it must be remembered that we only have in 
mind that sort of beauty which we see in the world, 
that beauty which if it has been especially prepared for 
us by an Intelligence, should as Ruskin says awaken 
"joy, admiration, gratitude." This beauty of the 
natural world no man more potently, more eloquently 
recognized than this same Ruskin, who with reverent 
feet, but with all-seeing eye, has w^alked upon the 
earth as one wearing the mantle of inspiration. He has 
pointed out for us the beauty of Infinity, which he 
associates with calm and luminous distance, whose 
pleasure is ''the most singular and memorable of which 
we can be conscious, whether all that is dazzling in 
color, perfect in form, gladdening in expression, be not 
of evanescent and shallow appealing, when compared 
with the still small voice of the level twilight behind 
purple hills, or the scarlet arch of dawn over the dark, 
troublous-edged sea." Then follows the beauty of 
Unity, where, with individual detail, the massiveness of 
effect follows the presentation of common form, mo- 
tion, substance, for "it is the working and walking and 
clinging together that gives their power to the winds, 
and its syllables and soundings to the air, and weight to 
the waves, and their burning to the sunbeams, and their 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 95 

stability to the mountains, and to every creature 
whatsoever operation is for its glory and for others' 
good." 

Then we are shown the beauty of Repose, which is 
either "a simple appearance of permanence and quiet- 
ness, as in the massy forms of a mountain or a rock, 
accompanied by the lulling effect of all mere mighty 
sight and sound, which all feel and none define; or else 
it is repose proper, the rest of things in which there is 
vitality or capability of motion actual or imagined"; 
then come Symmetry and Purity and Moderation, in 
which latter he speaks with charming feeling of "such 
gray green as that into which nature modifies her dis- 
tant tints, or such pale green and uncertain as we see 
in sunset sky, and in the clefts of the glacier and the 
chrysoprase, and the sea foam; and so of all colors, not 
that they may not sometimes be deep and full, but that 
there is a solemn moderation even in their very fullness, 
and a holy reference beyond and out of their own na- 
ture to great harmonies by which they are governed, 
and in obedience to which is their glory." These six 
heads constitute what he calls Typical Beauty and 
then he enters upon the analysis of Vital Beauty as 
first Relative, and second Generic, and thirdly In Man. 
The Relative is found in the fitting action and coopera- 
tion of all life on the earth, wherein "there is now 
uttered for us a call for sympathy, now offered to us an 
image of moral purpose and achievement, which how- 
ever unconscious or senseless the creature may indeed 
be that so seems to call, cannot be heard without affec- 
tion, nor contemplated without worship, by any of us 



96 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

whose heart is rightly tuned, or whose mind is clearly 
and surely sighted." 

Of the Generic, which might be understood as the 
Ideal, he says ''therefore the task of the painter in his 
pursuit of ideal form is to attain accurate knowledge, 
so far as may be in his power, of the character, habits, 
and peculiar virtues and duties of every specie of being; 
down even to the stone, for there is an ideality of stones 
according to their kind, an ideality of granite and slate 
and marble, and it is in the utmost and most exalted 
exhibition of such individual character, order and use, 
that all ideality of art consists. The more cautious he 
is in assigning the right species of moss to its favorite 
trunk, and the right kind of weed to its necessary 
stone, in marking the definite and characteristic leaf, 
blossom, seed, fracture, color, and inward anatomy of 
every thing, the more truly ideal his work becomes." 
In Man beauty seems to have suffered much natural 
defacement, suggesting that Fall which — in deference to 
Christian teachings — we have continuously mentioned. 
Thus Ruskin writes "But behold now a sudden change 
from all former experience. No longer among the 
individuals of the race is there equality or likeness, a 
distributed fairness and fixed type visible in each, but 
evil diversity, and terrible stamp of various degrada- 
tion; features seamed with sickness, dimmed by sen- 
suality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, 
shadowed by sorrow, branded with remorse; bodies 
consumed by sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by 
disease, dishonored in foul uses; intellects without 
power, hearts without hope, minds earthly and devilish ; 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 97 

our bones full of the sins of our youth, the heaven 
revealing our iniquity, the earth rising up against us, 
the roots dried up beneath, and the branch cut off 
above; well for us only, if, after beholding this our 
natural face in a glass, we desire not straightway to 
forget what manner of men we be." 

The upshot of all this is clear. There is beauty in 
the world of the highest order and almost — excepting 
the sad exception of man himself — universal, covering 
the earth and dwelling in the sky with an almost in- 
sufferable intensity, omnipresent and insistent, and 
yet too, mysteriously eluding vulgar search, but re- 
vealed to poets in many subtleties of tenderness, and 
veiled sacraments of glory, and with all wonderfully 
springing from that law and order, by relevant and 
inerrant rules, by which formerly we got the impression 
of a machine, though, as so keenly observed by Ruskin, 
"it is to be noted that whenever we dissect the animal 
frame, or conceive it as dissected, and substitute in our 
ideas the neatness of mechanical contrivance for the 
pleasures of the animal; the moment we reduce en- 
joyment to ingenuity and volition to leverage, that 
instant all sense of beauty disappears." 

Now where among men shall we find the analogy of 
the same sort of giver of beauty? From whose qualities 
may we argue God's? They are most evidently the 
poets and the painters or artists, who return to us the 
beauty of the world, as they, with deep seeing eyes and 
gifted expression obtain it. These vary enormously 
in their power, but with those who sincerely and with 
loving hearts and steadfast mien contemplate nature 



98 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

and Man, they do in reality come between us and God 
as expositors of his gifts. Now if we regard these 
persons and take them throughout their wide and multi- 
formly diversified traits, we are invariably permitted to 
learn that they are merciful, generous to need, sympa- 
thetic, full of loving insight, quick to heed appeals, 
with a sort of resolute willingness to help, and not 
infrequently heated into a kind of madness to set things 
straight, as they understand straightness. 

Such men were Shelley, Keats, Byron, Goldsmith, 
Whittier, Burns, Chaucer as amongst the more trans- 
parently genial to the calls of compassion. But it is 
unnecessary to even hint at names. The doing with 
the beauty of the world, which, in the sense of Ruskin's 
Theoretic Faculty has had no profound development 
before the Christian thought and temperament arose, 
with its varied response to the shadowyness of the earth, 
and indeed has reached only the more copious expres- 
sions in modern times; this doing with beauty can 
have but a foregone conclusion. It softens the heart, 
it leads away from conventional harshnesses, and pours 
lustres of merciful contemplation over the soul. 

It thus becomes apparent that we have every reason 
to think that God as an intellectual obligation to Him- 
self would tell us — if we asked — what this machine of 
the world is, and whether He made it and whether we, 
as parts of it, have a destiny apart from it, and, as the 
giver of its beauty, would be most mercifully inclined 
to appreciate and condescend to our urgency and tear- 
ful supplications. All this seems so indubitable that 
we might say that the Christian hypothesis — by the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 99 

countenance of whose assumptions it is made — would 
stand or fall by the favorable or unfavorable outcome 
of the experiment. What form shall the experiment 
take, how shall we find out whether we confront a 
silent or a speaking God, how assault with importunity 
that tremendous and almost inconceivable power that 
has originated this so stupendous fabric, this intermin- 
able mechanism, this tabernacle and fane of beauty? 



CHAPTER IV 
The Plan 

On the Christian plan of action, in such a case, its 
deeply imbedded practice comes forcibly and with an 
invincible appositeness to mind. We should pray. 
We have constructed all our approaches to this plan 
upon Christian statement. We logically accept its 
alternative. Let the Plan be prayer. The matter 
deserves a little enlargement. 

It might at first appear to the larger number of today 
well read and worldly thinking men and women, that 
prayer has no conceivable efficacy in rearranging or 
intercepting the natural and regular course of nature; 
and that its intervention in the affairs of the physical 
world is a foolish delusion. They feel at a loss to under- 
stand how there could be averted sunstroke, lightning 
shock, earthquake, destruction, deluge, drought, pesti- 
lence, accident, so far as these depended upon the 
necessary antecedents in the realm of natural law to 
accomplish them or prevent them. They would agree 
with Lord Palmerston that the prayer that abolishes 
cholera or typhoid fever is cleanliness and sanitation. 
On the other hand in matters of the spirit or mind they 
would — perhaps in a faltering way — concede that 
prayer has an estimable weight, but even then subjec- 
tively, by moulding the feelings to the phases of emo- 
tion expressed in the prayer. If a man prayed for the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 101 

removal of a disagreeable attitude of temper he might 
gain relief from the very intensity of his subjective 
contemplation of his desire; but if he asked for guid- 
ance in the proper course of conduct, as in a battle or in 
affairs of state, they might question its applicability, 
and thus reassert, as in the previous instances, their 
rooted scepticism of the interference, condescension, 
and actual agency of a supernatural power, whose skill 
as an omniscient being would, if available, secure 
absolutely a certain result. 

This diffidence about the use of prayer is very sincere, 
and it is very natural ; it seems involved in the texture 
of modern thinking, not belligerently or scoffingly, but 
irredeemably placed there by education and environ- 
ment. Now it is to be observed that in the case under 
consideration there is no question raised as to the con- 
duct of either nature or man ; there is no calling for any 
change in the fixed disposition of the elements in one 
or the other. The suggestion is to frame on the largest 
scale imaginable a very vast and a very earnest ques- 
tion, pervading it however with that interior posture of 
reverence which among believing Christians is insepar- 
able from the conception of prayer. 

Why is it not possible for any earnest and thoughtful 
man or woman to engage in this undertaking, which 
should be spontaneously willing, consentaneous, and 
of universal scope ? Let it be observed that this Plan 
is not promoted in any spirit of fantastic curiosity or 
insidious and winking satire; it seems to us a serious 
and virtual proposition, that a wide and searching 
request, a petition directed as well as human experience 



102 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

can show, towards the accepted Author of this universe, 
and this earth, in which according to the doctrines of 
those revelations, which form for a large part of the 
race, a veritable testimony of His imminent relation to 
the whole human family. He has been vitally concerned, 
and wherein a scheme instituted by Him known as the 
Scheme of Salvation is now actually in process of enact- 
ment, that such a petition incorporating, in some 
fashion all thoughtful men and women might receive a 
recognizable answer. 

What might be called the Eugenics of Prayer has not 
been, as far as we know, clearly outlined; the success 
of prayer ''does not come with observation," and the 
wandering ministrations of the Spirit permit no hard 
and fast rule, or even any observed schedule of practice 
for its prosperity. Is it in numbers, in the excellence 
of the supplicant, the reasonableness and amiability of 
the supplication, the fierce concentration of desire, or 
in some other feature recondite and mysterious, can- 
not be certainly known, except that broadly, the spirit 
of prayer should be preserved, which undoubtedly 
means a self-abandonment in the motive of the prayer, 
and an absolute confidence that it is heard. Of course 
individual power has been proven important in the 
lives of the saints, though the matter, so far as historical 
records go, appears more luminously in the lives of the 
Catholic worthies. 

St. Francis of Assisi who initiated a movement which 
had, according to his biographer (W. J. Knox Little), 
"a striking resemblance in many points to the first age 
of the Church," rejoiced apparently in the more 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 103 

marvellous efficiencies of prayer, catching, so the le- 
gends or facts in the case state, glimpses of immaterial 
things, and painted visions of beauty. Little says at 
his time, "there was much cruelty and oppression, the 
poor were in almost hopeless misery ; the rich wrapped 
in worldliness, selfishness and luxury. Religion had 
become to a great extent merely nominal. The church 
was failing in her mission, deeply corrupt, and terribly 
inefficient; words had taken the place of things." 
St. Francis and his followers as Dean Church explains, 
became a peculiar people, and their efforts at reform 
''meant that, for that service, they had absolutely 
separated themselves from the common aims of human 
life, the ordinary pursuits, the usual course and stream 
of activity all round them. They had to work apart 
from all this, and for this service alone they lived." 

It might be well expected that prayer, if there is 
truth in the affinity of goodness with the superinten- 
dence and the observation of a ruling Providence, would 
secure some substantial and positive tokens of its 
acceptance in the case of a man bearing upon himself 
(the fact of the ''stigmata" is subscribed to by Little, 
but has received a physiological elucidation) the 
miraculous marks of a hypostatic martyrdom. The 
unfailing perfection of conduct united with an extreme 
and indefatigable ardor for benevolence, and that 
delirious satisfaction in bodily humiliations and indigni- 
ties and deprivations, which so delight the Roman 
zealots, distinguished Saint Francis of Assisi, though 
there was not wanting as might be apprehended from 
his practical success, sound sense and wise deliberation 
in his plans. 



104 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

Again if we turn to the annals of Saint Francis Xavier 
we are plunged at once, in the not perhaps over vera- 
cious history of Father Dominick Bohours, into a scene 
of various astonishment, where we follow the intrepid 
and restlCvSS wanderings of a veritable knight-missioner. 

Saint Francis Xavier thirsted for spiritual conquest, 
and under the influence of martial impressions and 
duties would have made an indomitable fighter. He 
rushed impetuously throughout the East, over running 
India, the Moluccas, Amboyna, Japan, Malacca, 
thirsting for adventure, tumultuously mixing up prayers 
and devotion, sermons and harangues, struggles and 
repulses, attacks and rescues, in the most picturesque 
confusion. He was indeed denominated *'the man of 
prodigies, the friend of heaven, the master of nature, 
and the god of the world." His prayers possessed 
surpassing power and he seemed especially endowed 
with magical domination, raising the dead, prophesying 
while his ironic indifference and open scorn of demons, 
caused these agile imps to assault "him in great num- 
bers, and beat him so violently that he was all over 
bruised, and forced to keep his bed for some days 
together.** 

As with Ignatius Loyala, his ecstatic moods in prayer 
had the appearance of a reversion of natural laws. His 
transported biographer tell us that "some have affirmed 
that at first they have found him on his knees immov- 
able, how" by degrees he was mounted from the earth: 
and that then being seized with a sacred horror, they 
could not steadfastly behold him so bright and radiant 
was his countenance. Others have protested, that 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 105 

while he was speaking to them of the things of God, they 
could perceive him shooting upward, and distancing 
himself from them on a sudden, and his body raising 
itself on high of its own motion." His prayers imbued 
him with a ferocity of daring, and in his encounter with 
the wild Badages he rushed upon them with a few^ 
followers and fairly took their breath away by his 
impetuosity, for his words "cast a terror into the minds 
of these soldiers, who were at the head of the army; 
they remained confounded, and without motion. 
They, who marched after them, seeing the foremost 
advanced not, asked the reason of it; answer was 
returned from the first ranks, that they had before 
their eyes an unknown person habited in black, of a 
more than human stature, of a terrible aspect, and dart- 
ing fire from his eyes. The most hardy were desirous 
to satisfy themselves concerning what was told them, 
they were seized with amazement at the sight, and all 
of them fled w^ith precipitate confusion." 

If we consider the story of Saint Anthony as narrated 
by Athanasius and displayed by Newman we find re- 
newed emphasis of the power of prayer, though in his 
case, as applied to the sick, it often failed ; "when heard 
he did not boast; when unsuccessful, he did not mur- 
mur; but under all circumstances, he gave thanks him- 
self to the Lord, and exhorted the sufferers to be patient, 
and to be assured that their cure was out of the power 
of himself, and indeed of any man, and lay with God 
only, who wrought when He would, and towards whom 
He chose." 

The miraculous effects of prayer (and in the Plan now 



106 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

to be promoted the miraculous is essentially present), 
are seen in the published records of the lives of the 
various saints, with some diversity, but in the main 
with one purport, for as Cardinal Newman has said *4t 
would be very easy to mistake a chapter in the life of 
one holy missionary or nun for a chapter in the life of 
another." There are the miracles of the dwellers in the 
wilderness — the Solitaries — and those of Saint Martin, 
Saint Anthony, Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus, Saint 
Hubert, Saint Teresa and so many others that it would 
be folly and fatigue to try their numbers. The point is 
here to be made, that if, as a historical fact, prayer has 
a supernatural efficacy, what are the indispensable 
accompaniments of it in that respect? 

In the lives of the saints the interposition of a divine 
agency to avert disaster, to cure the sick, to raise the 
dead, with portents and visions and manifestations of 
direful or momentous interest are dwelt on, but are not 
precisely what we are now in search of. Did prayer 
also secure illumination? Were the minds of the prayer- 
ful taught? Were ideas imparted, and direct knowledge 
vouchsafed? It would doubtless seem so, to a Catholic, 
as he reads of the incessant fighting for the preservation 
of a correct creed, and the involution of the leaders of 
the Church in this conflict; how Basil and Gregory 
extirpated Arianism in the East; how Saint Augustine 
of Hippo routed heresy and schism in Africa; how Cyril 
disciplined Nestorius, and how the innumerable gnostic 
sects were confronted, denied, and overthrown. 

In all this clamor of debate, argument, intrigue, 
shuffling of views, and iteration of dogma, fencing of 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 107 

dialetics, palsy of judgment, and flattering compromise, 
to a Catholic, the true way was kept by the Fathers of 
the Church through guidance gained by prayer. It 
would appear to them at least as impossible to conceive 
that the deposits of the faith were kept unadulterated, 
except their guardians had maintained an interior 
fixity of mind conferred upon them by prayer. 

So it would, in the Hght of this evidence appear to 
Catholics that prayer does illuminate; does furnish 
knowledge as well as issue in a profusion of miraculous 
phenomena. But it would be wholly inadmissible to 
limit an inquiry, as to the possible usefulness of prayer 
in the Plan here projected, to an age and a group of re- 
markable men, whose asceticism, imperious faith, and 
habits of incessant religious meditation, are much at 
Variance with our day. 

The tyranny of Protestant prejudices directs us to 
look for the influence of prayer in less remote, less 
mystical ages, in times when a more soothing sense of 
the vitality, value, and harmlessness of material joys 
prevails, when, as Gail Hamilton put in long ago, people 
believe that ''religion organizes and symmetrizes life, 
but cramps nothing, annihilates nothing." But before 
doing so a moment's attention to the characteristics of 
the workers in prayer, we have mentioned, is helpful, 
for an estimate of the properties to be sought in our 
hypothetical experiment in the same direction. These 
men shown us by the early Church refined away their 
bodily qualities by the most aggravated mortification, 
while by religious devotions, and unappeasable compas- 
sion for suffering, and reckless unpremeditating self- 



108 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

sacrifice, they attained a sublimity of spiritual insight, 
and may have, as it were, coerced upon themselves 
the endowment of supernatural virtues, so that they 
held a membership, and wielded a sovereignty in divine 
economies. 

Now it is almost ludicrously certain that the propul- 
sion of the Plan cannot receive help from this class of 
persons as they do not evidently exist today. Nor 
would their agency we suppose be exactly calculated to 
assist it. Saints of the type we have been rehearsing, 
move in individualized circles of influence, and might 
be said, in the past to have met doctrinal exigencies, or 
the special calls of localized calamities. Their influence 
in the feasibility of a large racial prayer might not be 
more important than the reader's or the author's. 
Still, as we shall learn later on, the lessons of their con- 
duct will be most useful in the way of suggestion. 

When we reach Protestant examples of spiritual 
power or, as might be said, protagonists of prayer, we 
encounter a more moderate dispensation of regimen, 
and one which, divested of the too unctuous surrender 
to self depreciation, assumes in our eyes a more refined, 
a statelier, and simpler fervency. Men engaged in 
serious matters of secular change, the liberation of 
people, the protection of liberty, the repulse of tyranny 
and corruption, have found reinforcement of their 
resolves and enlightenment of their minds in prayer. 
At least it seems so, and they appeal to our modern 
sense with a more congruous force than the weeping 
self-accusations of early Christian saints, though we 
must deeply reverence the firmness of conviction that 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 109 

brought immolation to these latter, for conscience sake, 
and the security of Truth. These later examples of 
prayerful men do not so exceptionally illustrate the 
power of prayer or establish its reality. No miracles, 
no vision, none of the apparatus of supernature, at- 
tested its actual force. But in the view of those who 
used it, in critical occasions, its validity was established. 
Let us see. 

In the characters and works of William of Orange, 
George Washington, and Oliver Cromwell, we are 
brought in contact with that disposition of faculties 
and ideals, which have been most useful in the estab- 
lishment of enduring and vSelf preservative institutions, 
in the growth of those sentiments which are the most 
sensibly helpful to human society, and in the perpetua- 
tion of the solidest standards of human conduct. They 
were men who fought disinterestedly for the mainte- 
nance, for the principles, of individualism, the self- 
propagating vigor of independent thought, and the 
fruitful liberties of untrammelled choice. They were 
bred in homes of regulated supervision, and learned in 
early years the enforced lessons of sobriety and self- 
command ; their natures by the fortunate concurrence 
of heredity and education developed along the lines of 
earnestness and responsibility, and history conducted 
them into the fields of action, where the fates of nations 
hang in the balance, and the destinies of men wait on the 
issues of battles and debates. Sobered by their own 
emergence among the leaders of the centuries, and 
never forgetful of impressions that matured with their 
growing years, they have not hesitated to look for sup- 



no THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

port, or at any rate to ask for it, from Sources 
mysterious and superhuman. 

As regards William of Orange we are told by Motley 
that his mother — Juliana of Stolberg — "was a person of 
most exemplary character and unaffected piety. She 
instilled into the minds of all her children the elements 
of that devotional sentiment which was her own striking 
characteristic, and it was destined that the seed sown 
early should increase to an abundant harvest. Nothing 
can be more tender or more touching than the letters 
which still exist from her hand, written to her illustrious 
sons in hours of anxiety or anguish, and to the last, 
recommending to them with as much earnest simplicity 
as if they were still little children at her knee, to rely 
alway, in the midst of the trials and dangers which 
were to beset their paths through life, upon the great 
hand of God." In a man sedate, restrained, serious in 
observation, and constrained by judgment, such a 
training formed irrevocably, the texture of his moral 
fibre. It lasted him through life, and it revealed itself 
in habits of prayer. 

As to Washington, Irving traces in him also the 
permanent effects of a mother's fostering care, the 
indelible imprints of early discipline. He says; ''tradi- 
tion gives an interesting picture of the widow, with her 
little flock gathered round her, as was her daily wont, 
reading to them lessons of religion and morality out of 
some standard work. Her favorite volume was Sir 
Matthew Hale's Contemplations, moral and divine. 
The admirable maxims therein contained for outward 
action as well as self-government, sank deep into the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 111 

mind of George, and, doubtless had a great influence in 
forming his character. They certainly were exempli- 
fied in his conduct throughout life. This mother's 
manual, bearing his mother's name, Mary Washington, 
written with her own hand, was ever preserved by him 
with filial care, and may still be seen in the archives of 
Mount Vernon. A precious document ! Let those who 
wish to know the moral foundation of his character 
consult its pages." That Washington used prayer in 
the trials and arduous predicaments of his life, at 
the moments when its actual satisfaction by response 
was necessary, is well known, or at least popularly be- 
lieved.* 

As to Cromwell, Carlyle says of his time *'a practical 
world based on Belief in God — such as many centuries 
had seen before, but as never any century since has been 
privileged to see. It was the last glimpse of it in our 
world, this of English Puritanism very great, very 
glorious; tragical enough to all thinking hearts that 
look on it from these days of ours." It would be in 
Cromwell's case superfluous to argue as to his reliance 
on God, a very self-evident fact; this extract from a 
letter written at the Battle of Worcester is pertinent, 
''the Lord God Almighty frame our hearts to real 
thankfulness for this, which is alone His doing"; and 
again at Dunbar he writes, ''but the only wise God 
knows what is best. All shall wait for God. Our 

*John M. Robettson has adduced some evidence to the effect that Washing- 
ton was a merely formal Christian. Wellington's biographer relates the stric- 
tures made upon the Iron Duke's absence from church service, which I think 
Wellington excused on the grounds of his imperfect hearing — certainly a 
ludicrous extenuation. We might infer from Robettson, a similar luke-warm 
though respectful bearing towards Christian doctrine on the part of Washington. 



112 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

spirits are comfortable, praise be the Lord — though 
our present condition be as it is. And indeed we had 
much hope in the Lord : of whose mercy we have had 
large experience." All of Cromwell's letters, as given 
by Carlyle, are filled from edge to edge with sympto- 
matic prayerfulness and piety. 

If these men — instruments in some of the most 
momentous occurrences of modern times — used prayer, 
was it of any more assistance to them than a salutary 
moral and subjectively strengthening practice? It 
certainly cannot be proven that it was. There was 
raised for them after intercessions of this sort no in hoc 
signo vinciy there were uttered no signals of condescen- 
sion, no voices were heard, no ministering seraphs 
came, nor did celestial warriors fight in their midst in 
warfare, or white robed councillors open the heavens of 
admonition and warning and direction. Would the 
Rise of the Dutch Republic have been the same histori- 
cal event without the intervention of the Prince of 
Nassau's prayers, the American Revolution as positive 
a result without the piety of Washington, or the over- 
throw of royalism as circumstantial and final without 
the self consecration of Cromwell? Who can say? 
The settlement of just such a query enters into the 
practical consequences of the Plan here to be outlined. 
Yet with whatever misgivings we retire from the con- 
templation of these alternatives, it is absolutely assured 
that generations of men have assigned a real efficacy 
to the prayers of these distinguished and successful 
actors in the campaign of human rights and the march 
of civil deliverance. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 113 

If we look about for examples of the use of prayer on 
some great public or national scale by some unanimous 
and concerted operation of sympathy, we might advert 
to the recent national assemblage of the people on the 
occasion of the assassination of President Garfield. In 
the summer of 1881, the President was shot at the 
railway station in Washington, by a demented and 
depraved culprit, inflamed with conceited delusions, 
scurrilous from envy, and strangely degenerate in 
language and perception. 

The President was threatened with blood poisoning 
(Septicaemia) , and the bullet, at first thought to be im- 
bedded in his liver, defied extraction. Surgery and 
medicine hastened to his bedside, and the whole country 
with an inevitable sympathy and apprehension waited 
anxiously for the issue. Finally there was a religious 
demonstration. The people of the nation were sum- 
moned to their churches, and synagogues, and a vast 
imploration instituted. 

It was earnestly made; it represented a real and un- 
affected appeal; it was not marred by ribaldry or 
scorn; many may have looked with wonder and utter 
incredulity at this remarkable intervention, but they 
certainly remained quiet and attentive, and not unwill- 
ing, from the depth of their own sorrow and regret, to 
welcome its propitious effects. But the President died. 
And the sardonic commentary, written by events, was, 
that the doctors had missed the location of the fatal 
bullet, and had the discovery of later years — viz. the 
Rontgen rays — been then at their command, the hidden 
missile would have been revealed, and the President 



114 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

should have recovered. Apparently then knowledge, 
merely a little more science, would have kept the 
President alive — while, to the confusion of faith, the 
prayers of the Nation availed nothing. 

There is however one circumstance which might be 
dwelt on. After the day of prayer there was a notice- 
able improvement. It might be tentatively urged that 
had the prayers continued, had they been pushed with 
homogeneous energy some time longer, they might 
have brought relief. Yet although the ceremonial 
conspicuousness of a nation's humility lasted but a day, 
in no household in the United States, where the custom 
of prayer obtains, was the President's extremity for- 
gotten. Is public prayer and the communal utterance 
of numbers more effective than even one honest suppli- 
cation, from a grieving heart? Again it might be 
noticed that thousands made no sign, could make none, 
because they thought the expedient futile and supersti- 
tious. This national effort, approximating in char- 
acter to the Plan we are about to describe would, with 
many, replace the Plan itself and prove that either 
there was no God, or that He was silent, indolent or 
indifferent. But this is sophistry. To the plans of 
Omniscience the President's death was or might have 
been a necessity, with reference to something, depend- 
ent upon it, for its realization. And — though it is a 
puerile suggestion — this occurrence might be prejudged 
as the healing of a dangerous rupture in a national party, 
or the rebuke of the spirit of Contumacy and Spoils. 

It might be safely affirmed that among the incentives 
to prayer that, within the meaning of the word and 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 115 

determined by personal experience as we find it in the 
records of those quahfied to speak, the pressure of 
external dangers or solicitudes impart to it the requisite 
energy, the intense psychic abandonment of interfering 
thoughts that would give it superior potency. Thus 
John Knox, in his treatise ''A Declaration of the True 
Nature and Object of Prayer," says "trouble and fear 
are very spurs to prayer; for when man, compassed 
about with vehement calamities, and vexed with 
continual solicitude, having by help of man no hope of 
deliverance, with sore oppressed and punished heart, 
fearing also greater punishment to follow from the 
deep pit of tribulation, doth call to God for comfort, 
and help, such prayer ascendeth to God's presence and 
returneth not in vain." If the prayer contemplated in 
our Plan is to attain a veritable excellence, this kind of 
urgency should enter into it, though we fear it cannot, 
as the Plan — like this essay — is conceived in a partial 
spirit of skeptical remonstrance. However we shall 
expound that part of it later. 

John Wesley, as an exponent of religious fervor, a 
fearless and tireless adventurer for the bestowal of 
religious mercies, asserted — as was inevitable — the 
virtue of prayer. But perhaps this remarkable man, 
bold, distinct, and renovating, does not deserve too 
much credence, for he was over credulous in super- 
natural things, finding no difficulty in accepting witch- 
craft, apparitions, demoniacal possessions, portents, 
and dreams, and was as much impressed as any one in 
the commonplace stories of unearthly visitations. 

The famous apparition of the Cock Lane ghost. 



116 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

afterwards demonstrated to have been an imposture, in- 
volving the skillful accomplishments of a ventriloquist, 
and the auxiliary intervention of a Mr. and Mrs. 
William Parsons, would have been accepted by Wesley 
unhesitatingly. This certification to the invasion of 
the world of every day occurrences by something 
different and unaccountable seems natural in a man 
encountering at his revivals such nervous dislocations, 
as are described in his Diary, where ''seizures," con- 
vulsions, when men had "great drops of sweat run 
down their faces and all their bones shook," occurred, 
when disasters were apparently averted through prayer, 
and sickness was cured by Faith; — the latter a benefi- 
cial alternative, as might be understood, at a time, 
when medicine was a wretched mixture of blood letting 
and drastic purges, a feeble and blind art well calculated 
to destroy mind and body. Here however we meet in 
Wesley again, the mental concentration and faith, the 
unreserved surrender to the subjective impressions of the 
mind, when, as Professor Frank Granger has written 
of ''Voices and Visions" ; "they are not always projected 
upon the outer world, but seem rather to be ideas vividly 
presented to the mind in a visible and audible form." 
We have only glanced at the long list of instances of 
the successful employment of prayer. Naturally, in 
the chronicles of the religious, these become intermin- 
ably multiplied, and the readiness to assign every 
favoring chance in life, each return to health and the 
propitious smile of fortune to the power of prayer, is 
inevitable with those whose days begin and end with 
prayer, and whose hours from sunrise to sunset are 
filled with its almost involuntary support and utterance. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 117 

But, however slightingly regarded, however often we 
may believe the ascent of prayer and the winning of a 
desired end are accidental coincidences, which appear 
to the recipients, as having a casual connexion, it is as 
clear as daylight that through its agency we must expect 
to formulate the appeal to God to again declare Himself, 
and to again pronounce upon our relations to this Uni- 
verse of His, our own terms of existence, and upon the 
value of the Philosophy of that Theology which 
makes our behaviour a measure of our reward, and 
the fact of Immortality an article of its creed. How 
clear this is! Reflection or Invention can neither sug- 
gest any other Plan ; and they, gathering together the 
fruits of experience, the facts of observation, and the 
council of those to whom Prayer is a discipline, an art, 
and a system, having, if not an intelligible, an observed 
Law of Proficiency, must denote that only through 
such an avenue of approach may the Question be asked 
or the Answer be expected. 

If we look a little more closely at what might be 
called the Constants of Prayer — the developments of 
those essentials which administer to it adequacy and 
certainty, we find them I think, implied in 

First, Mental Power or Concentration; 

Second, Mental Confidence or Cheerfulness, ''faith"; 

Third, Mental Persistence or Iteration; 
and along with these a group of corporeal conditions, 
states of the body, which function in a tributary and 
helpful way to make the Mental Power stronger, the 
Mental Confidence deeper, and the Mental Persistence 
more unswerving. It is most plain that the prayer to 



118 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

be used in the Plan is petitional Prayer; it is not that 
reverential and emotional exercise which has been thus 
alluded to by Saint Teresa, ''the soul which begins to 
walk in the way of mental prayer with resolution, and 
is determined not to care much, neither to rejoice nor 
to be greatly afflicted, whether sweetness and tender- 
ness fail it, or our Lord grants them, has already 
traveled a great part of the road"; it would not be 
exactly I think, as Professor Granger says, "the expres- 
sion of the love of the soul towards its invisible com- 
panion — a love which does not consist in tears, nor in 
this sweetness and tenderness which we for the most 
part desire, and with which we console ourselves, but 
rather in serving Him in justice, fortitude, and 
humility," though such states and attitudes might 
form the sub-conscious ground from which the prayer 
started. 

The prayer itself would be conceived in a spirit of 
intellectual hunger. It would be the monstrous and 
absolute summons for Revelation. There would be 
for it no equivalent in a purely receptive state. To 
give it the highest psychological force, its reasonable- 
ness — perhaps its necessity — must be acutely realized. 
And this, just with those whose praying powers would 
be most needed, might be resented. The need of a new 
Declaration from God should be felt as keenly as those 
"troubles and fears," which John Knox alluded to as 
the "very spurs to prayer." Here might arise a real 
difficulty. The religious, the orthodox, the believers, 
the faithful, the army of Christians might not under- 
stand this need, nor care for it though why they should 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 119 

not, is hard to see. But again its realization among 
another large and unconnected group, might as sud- 
denly augment the praying company by a very utiliz- 
able mass of mental force. These would be however 
novices and untrained in devotional processes. 

Answer to prayer on a scale of magnificence, of por- 
tentous or beautiful happenings, in any such degree as 
entitles it to be called a Revelation cannot be carelessly 
expected. However constantly and quietly the revenue 
of prayer and insight, through prayer, accumulates, to 
the Christian, it will be granted by its beneficiary, that 
it is attended with no phenomena of wonders. But our 
Plan, it seems to us, must contemplate a manifestation 
from God, if it comes at all, and the answer is convinc- 
ingly affirmative and instructive, of extraordinary 
physical volume. Consider our project, how grandiose 
and stupendous it is. We would, as it were, summon 
the populations of the world to raise a universal cry for 
God's Appearance, somehow, with reassuring certainty. 
And imagine the consequences. A world blazing with 
a new fire of conviction, for an instant at least fused 
into a solidarity of action, of expectation, of acceptance, 
that would melt the barriers of nations, the boundaries 
of creeds, and fertilize with an exuberance, past descrip- 
tion or computation, the fields and the flowers of 
benevolence, while the devastating plague of crime and 
corruption, idiocy, blackguardism, diseased hearts and 
burnt out passions, would shrink into annihilation 
before this Unshrouded Assertion, once for all un- 
mistakable and complete. 

We may be all wrong; the Plan barren of results; 
but Why? 



CHAPTER V 

The Plan (Continued) 

The Plan contemplates at first a missionary cam- 
paign for the illustration and emphasis of its special 
object; a preliminary excitation of the attention and 
the feelings of the world, as to the value of such an 
effort. These missionary preachments might extend 
over an entire year accompanied by the wide circula- 
tion of tracts for the same purpose. They would 
involve a rational discussion of our needs in the matter 
with exhortations and advice, as to the seriousness and 
the strange possibilities of the movement. Discussion 
should be prohibited, so far at least, as to bring rancor 
or discord among its participants. It must assume, it 
must preserve an expression of august and silent 
earnestness, its emotional force cannot be wasted in 
the acridities of debate. Let the question be fairly 
put whether the world is not today anxious to know 
more about the things which concern the critical ques- 
tion of religion, and whether there is not dwelling in the 
hearts of many, a momentous gravity of doubt as to 
the meaning of our incessant activities before the silence 
of the grave. The aspect of curious experimentation 
should be utterly annihilated. It must embody the 
entire psychic energy of people, being conducted in a 
spirit of the most solemn self-forgetfulness, suffused, so 
to speak, with a shuddering wonder and tenderness of 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 121 

desire, which will bring to the surface the immitigable 
cravings of our hearts to have light and understanding. 

This preliminary phase of the undertaking is im- 
portant; it means the thorough impregnation of the 
people's mind with the solemnity and the urgency of 
the inquiry. The scheme should be most variously 
divided. Its philosophic aspects, its practical conse- 
quences, its religious significance, the very overt bear- 
ing it has upon the whole conduct of life, national and 
personal, the fundamental suggestions it may furnish 
as to how the answer meets the public problems of 
society, as well as the new commands it may publish to 
the individual should be displayed. For such purposes 
selected men should present it and the presentation 
should above all things be careful and devout, in the 
sense that they feel the seriousness of the work and the 
absolute demand for honesty and sincerity and a certain 
watchful self-restraint and self effacement. 

It is not difficult to previse what such presentations 
would be. The philosophers struggling with their 
solutions of the universe, catching stray rays of light 
here and there, and baffled in their grave and patient 
way with the practical contradictions of their laced and 
word spun iterations, would willingly consent to silence, 
while the consciousness of the race, with bowed heads 
and abject lips sought for a revealment from the in- 
visible, and they — proud reserved philosophers — ^stood 
aside expectantly, even if they did not unite in the Great 
Prayer. Science, jubilant and undismayed, meeting the 
witchcraft of the world of nature, with new incantations 
and a skill of its own, might suddenly confess itself 



122 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

impotent before the ultimate meaning of the earth, 
and the universe, and, with the sudden transport of a 
new convert, throw aside its scorn, calm its provocations 
to mirth, and kneel too with the supplicant multitude. 
Politics and statemanship could not fail unhesitatingly 
to feel the new easement that would supervene in the 
conduct of the world's affairs if the temper of the 
peoples — and their own as indivisible and one with it — 
gained a strange sobriety and elevation, while vastly 
looming in their eyes they saw the moral outlines of 
moral communities morally controlled. At no point 
of human interest could there be dissent, except with 
those who profit by confusion and disappointment, and 
despair, and crime, who shrink from a firmer answer and 
a steadier light in human creeds, since from uncertainty 
to incertainty in human thought they spin their 
gossamers of delusion or illusion, and sit in the middles 
of their crafty webs, wicked and vain, or foolish and 
futile. 

These administrations extending over a year might 
be conducted in churches, synagogues, public meeting 
places, in addresses, and in articles until the impetus of 
the great experiment carried its questions into the 
households, the warerooms, the counting houses, and 
passed insensibly, multiformly and intensely, into the 
current of the daily greeting and occupations, as to be 
subconsciously present to everyone at all times. The 
work must cover the earth ; in all nations, in all lan- 
guages, the same process of education, excitation, and 
appeal, should be conceived and executed, and among 
the non-Christian peoples their wise and thoughtful 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 123 

men — in whom of course reside the spirit of contempla- 
tion and aspiration — must also be gathered into the 
army of desire and supplication. The learned Hindoo, 
the grave Confucian, the poetic Tsaotist, the refined 
Persian, the reserved Mohammedan, and above all the 
Jew whose direct correlation with God, we accept as an 
historic fact could very willingly be incorporated in this 
movement, for it contemplates an approach to the 
Creator, divested of all dogmatic functions, or condi- 
tions, being the aggregated call of the whole human 
consciousness to its Author, of whom Prof. James has 
said ''the abysses of the human conscience are naked in 
His eyes. The ear of God knows the utterances of His 
soul and the cry of His imagination." 

Indeed it would be hard to conceive any more 
particular bond of sympathy between men of diverse 
faith, than just this mystery of life, which might yield 
to a partial brightness, if this Prayer was answered. 
Formerly a philosophy, a religion, a revelation, satisfied 
men, and an effort to add to the deposit of faith would 
have been regarded as an impertinence. This is no 
longer true. We find ourselves the imprisoned occu- 
pants of a little sphere, with unqualified powers of mind, 
and confronting objective states of matter inexplicable, 
unexplained, and subjective states of feeling and con- 
ception and reasoning, which, when materialized or 
expanded in history, develop a spectacle crowded with 
suffering — albeit much joy also — injustice and bereave- 
ment. And men are no longer wholly content with the 
apologies of the devout, or the specifications of the 
ingenious. How wonderfully the darkness would re- 
cede if the Heavens spoke! 



124 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

The effect of this crusade — the word is unpleasant 
and offensive — would be certainly impressive; I think 
the chief difficulty throughout would be the salvation 
of the emotional dignity of the movement, the preven- 
tion of it lapsing into solipsism, cant and condescension. 
This might be averted by keeping it connected with 
Christian practice, and using the necessary instruction, 
in its objects and aims, in the churches, for the very 
grounds of hope in the matter rest — as we have all along 
insisted — on the postulates of the Christian faith. 

I have not yet mentioned one chief misgiving. It is 
the view the Christian communities might take of it. 
Their help is absolutely indispensable, because of their 
cultivation of deep feehng, and the unquestioned beauty 
of their spiritual position. Perhaps they feel them- 
selves too well entrenched in certainty, to need further 
knowledge or would deem it an impertinence to ask for 
it. They might feel that they would forfeit all their 
Christian rights if they did so. It would then be essen- 
tial to meet and overcome these scruples. Practically 
the church members would be guided by their spiritual 
pastors and leaders, and it hardly seems possible that 
these men cognizant of the honest doubt, the wide re- 
jection of the Christian creeds, the failing strength of the 
churches everywhere — witness the slow but apparently 
certain dislodgment of the Catholic church in France, 
Italy, and Spain — the New Criticism, and its adherents, 
the sharp interrogation from the street and the University 
of the Christian doctrine, could look with any sentiment 
other than one of gratitude, at a design which would 
reinstate fervor and believing. The arguments of the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 125 

next chapter are intended to overcome this Christian 
repugnance if it existed. 

Now assuming unanimity of action, the subscription 
to the plan by the churches and the societies, the 
thinkers, the writers, the press, rulers of nations, the 
whole organized mass of intelligence and feeling in the 
whole world, then the preparation of the critical, the 
sublime moment follows, when the Prayer is made. 
At this point I should judge it a safe rule to unite the 
Prayer with the regular exercises or services of the 
church or societies. The Prayer should be wisely 
formed, and not extemporaneous any where. It 
should be in parts and separated by singing or music, 
and continued for a long time, with silences interpolated 
of meditation, or exhortation, or reflections, or readings. 
The Christian habit of approach to God must be ac- 
cepted. There is no other. This period of prayer 
might extend over a year, and the ministrants and the 
worshippers might exercise, during its duration, those 
observances of fasting or deprivation which — so far as 
the facts known to us in the history of prayer reveal it — 
have been tried with success in the past. And then, 
when all is done, when the devotional and the mental 
and the emotional energies of the race have been con- 
centrated in this Prayer, and the last resources of the 
soul have been exhausted, then succeeds the silence of 
expectation. 

The whole plan of this Revelatio revelata finds justifica- 
tion in Christian usage, as its expediency and propriety 
spring from Christian belief. Saint Augustine address- 
ing God says "Thou findest pleasure in us, and so re- 



126 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

gardest each of us as though Thou hadst him alone to 
care for"; it seems inconceivable that on such an 
assurance God should not satisfy this abundant call for 
knowledge. And as to any objection to the artificial 
structure of it; the ready made plans, the scheduled 
services, the premeditation, and the revised and edited 
Prayer; this is precisely what is done now in the 
churches at a festival, or a fast, or any other special 
moment of remembrance or anniversary. Nothing is 
more evident. It might indeed be recommended that 
men sit still, and think, losing themselves in profound 
reveries of thought and prayer. 

They can do so, but that is not ordinarily considered 
as effective as public service. We are indeed in this 
Plan taking Christians at their word. If Prayer is not 
any thing more than a subjective exercise, and its 
effects are subjective and its utterance a purely provi- 
sional device, and church services are ritualistic forms 
which animate or revivify states of feeling, and have, 
and can be discussed only as having, no objective 
ulterior reality in their petitions, then of course the Plan 
will be a foolish and inoperative one. It should be 
abandoned, for it would mean a lot of wasted earnest- 
ness and a silly prostitution of our faculties. It may 
be a foolish and inoperative plan, but the Christian has 
no right to think so, and we insist on his approval. 

The Christian prays for a number of direct physical 
benefits, and must, under the most ordinary supposi- 
tions of honesty, mean what he says. It is quite 
likely, indeed certain, that a large number of church 
goers who come under the designation of Christians, 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 127 

probably see little sense in praying for rain, or the safety 
of their sea going friends, while they approve of such a 
prayer as that which askes to preserve us "from pride, 
vainglory and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and 
malice, and all uncharitableness." 

They admire the generalized petition which asks 
God ''please to succour, help, and comfort all who are in 
danger, necessity and tribulation" but they might 
frown ominously if they heard the request that God 
should cure the typhoid fever of their neighbor's son. 
But this temporizing and fluctuating attitude is not 
technically or at all correctly the Christian's. He prays 
for material things and expects to get them. 

The Plan conceives a universal Prayer for the 
miraculous manifestation of God, or if not, in a sensible 
way, the miraculous manifestation, some sort of a 
manifestation, which will dispel the clouds of doubt, 
and so far set us right on the way of an unimpeachable 
philosophy if God exists ; if as the Christian affirms He 
is back of all phenomena, and represents the only pos- 
sible standard of reference which guides men's actions, 
and has instituted a technical system of salvation, as it 
is called, then can it be very justly doubted that we 
have a right to expect Him to look with the deepest 
compassion upon our wandering vagaries and assailed 
minds, when what He has said before to us now stands 
behind the veil of exact science and enlightened under- 
standings, behind also a large amount of rational study, 
where it seems to the most sincere, a little vague, 
vacillating, and incomprehensible. 

Would any Christian, speaking with transparent 



128 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

frankness deny our right to ask for light, for certitude, 
for something better able to establish our convictions 
than Catechisms of Assent, or Butler Analogies, or 
even as lovely a plea as Roger's Religious Conceptions 
of the World? Can we not ask for a new definite 
revelation w4th categorical affirmations ? 

It need not go so far as to make the world a solved 
and precise problem. With human powers of mind 
that would be impossible, but we have a need, large 
and unquenchable, to know the directive Power, the 
directional forces of the world, which at least will put 
at rest the querulous combats of theist and atheist, and 
bring to Faith the usufruct of the world's obedience. 

For let the Christian observe that if there is no Gody 
if the control is not gathered in the hands of Mind some- 
where, then the simple social and moral problems of 
the earth will receive a startlingly different solution 
from all that has been exacted from human rulers under 
the dispensations of Christianity, and we can start on a 
way of radical regeneration of society, where the 
elements of mercy will disappear in the over shadowing 
strides of Justice, and the rule of reason will stultify and 
demolish the pleas of sympathy or tenderness. 

There are two possibilities in the case. There is a 
God or there is no God; God speaks or He is silent. 
Christianity carrying the Bible in its hands says there is 
a God and He speaks. The Plan assumes the truth of 
the latter statement. But it could be interposed as an 
objection that God speaks at such times and seasons 
as in His wisdom and power He thinks is necessary, and 
that neither prayers or a Plan will coerce Him. Should 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 129 

the Plan fail to make returns, God's existence remains 
as unassailable as ever. Perhaps, but if the Plan fails 
to evoke a response, the probabilities of His existence 
would seem diminished. Let us see. 

We might insert still another alternative in the 
above; God might be merciful and compassionate or 
He might be simply an intellectual power, indifferent 
to human needs. The latter supposition is denied by 
Christianity, and we may insist that the Plan possesses 
feasibility because on the Christian assumption — a 
fundamental one also — God is merciful, compassionate, 
and attentive, and all this because He loves us. 

Besides from the beauty of the world we have de- 
ducted God's sense of Mercy. That is the Christian 
position forming the sub-stratum of his whole devo- 
tional and emotional life, and embodied in the scheme 
of Christian salvation. Now as to the likelihood that 
God would consider the present times as times in which 
it is unnecessary to speak, or as to the unwisdom of the 
Plan itself as a foolish enterprise, embodying a spirit of 
pragmatism and conceit, and hopelessly at variance 
with the proper attitude of patience and resignation, 
confidence and humility, which waits for God to choose 
His own time for any new communication with His 
people, and indeed expects none until the Day of 
Judgment. 

When Elijah offered to the people of Israel the trial 
between himself and the priests of Bael as to their 
respective power through the intervention of their 
Gods to light the sacrifice on the altar, it was eagerly 
accepted, and Elijah, after his famous sarcasm of the 



130 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

fruitless exertions of the priests of Bael to win the 
attention of their gods, crowned his own earnest invoca- 
tion with success for ''the fire of the Lord fell, and con- 
sumed the sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and 
the dust, and licked up the water that was in the 
trench. And when all the people saw it they fell on 
their faces: and they said. The Lord, He is the God; 
The Lord, He is the God." And short shrift was given 
to the priests of the Bael. 

This contest between Elijah and the priests of Bael 
contemplated a distinct predicament. The people of 
Israel had become honeycombed with pagan and 
abhorrent practices, and had denied or lost their faith. 
There was opportunely demanded a proof of the God 
whose prophet Elijah was, and Elijah gave it, in a 
manner most suitable to the times and the occasion. 
The priests of Bael were decidedly side-tracked. I do 
not know how frankly all Christians accept the story. 
Today it would be generally looked at with misgivings. 
But its moral is unmistakable. A critical juncture of dis- 
affection or rejection was met with a tremendous reversal 
of opinion caused by a thrilling and exhaustive miracle. 

Conditions today are similar in phase, even if they 
differ in quality ; today the whole temperamental state 
of reading and thinking people is skeptical, and where 
faith exists, in an orthodox sense, it is not too exacting 
nor too presumptuous; it neither dwells with excessive 
unction on the passages of Revelation which strain to 
the breaking point the chain of Christian allegiance, nor 
does it repudiate with great asperity the New Criticism, 
or a broad theology; whi'e outside of well ordered 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 131 

households, which by traditional force or innate dignity 
maintain a suitable demeanor of judgment and con- 
duct in the affairs of living, there runs riot a seething 
sea of atheistic scorn, which degenerates into social 
violence and exorbitant theories. 

There are great radical difficulties in life which are 
often personal, which it is hard to understand, and 
which cause unrest in those who try very hard to live 
just and blameless lives, which cause them to question 
quite unfeelingly the ordinary Christian view of God's 
relations to man, which some accept with nonchalance, 
and then live any kind of life they wish to. But it is in 
their general survey of nature and the world that they 
are driven to think that no moral or considerate super- 
vision rules it. 

The Christian must offer to them more proof; they 
demand a voice, a message, the rent veil of the temple or 
the sacrifice licked up by the sheet of descending fire. 
Huxley states their position broadly when he says; "the 
vast and varied procession of events which we call 
Nature, affords a sublime spectacle, and an inex- 
haustible wealth of attractive problems to the specula- 
tive observer. If we confine our attention to that 
aspect which engages the attention of the intellect, 
nature appears a beautiful and harmonious whole, 
the incarnation of a faultless logical process, from 
certain premises in the past to an inevitable con- 
clusion in the future. But if it be regarded from a 
less elevated, though more human point of view; if our 
moral sympathies are allowed to influence our judg- 
ment, and we permit ourselves to criticise our great 



132 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

mother as we criticise one another, then our verdict, at 
least as far as sentient nature is concerned, can hardly 
be favorable." 

Prof. George Burman Foster in his "Finality of the 
Christian Religion" has alluded to the suffering path 
of his experience in religious thought, and expressed his 
belief, "that a multitude of thoughtful men and women 
are passing through an experience similar to his own; 
and that a greater multitude will travel, with bleeding 
feet, the same via dolorosa, tomorrow and the day 
after." Prof. Foster has indeed vehemently insisted 
that the "watchword 'Christianity is an historical 
religion' is superficially true, but fundamentally false" 
and says further that its "redemptive facts" are not "so 
very many and not so very certain, neither so many nor 
so certain as they used to be — whereas it is at bottom 
a religion of spirit and of personality," which view of 
course offers a broad and easy way to complete nega- 
tion, and the most temporizing policy towards all 
schools of doubt. 

Prof. Foster continues "the law of the conservation of 
energy, together with the nebular hypothesis and 
Darwinism, seemed to eliminate definitely from the 
world all mystery, dependence, teleology. If mysteries 
remained they were simply unsolved but soluble prob- 
lems of science: the universe was to be completely 
understood without faith: if there was dependence, it 
was relative only, the dependence of one part on another 
part of the self-dependent whole: if there was adap- 
tation, it was not in the purpose, but in the result only : 
it was fully accounted by natural causes." 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 133 

In this spirit Laplace said "I have no need of the 
hypothesis of God." Joachim expected in the year 
1260 that Christian symbols would vanish '*as to form 
and abide only as their innermost content" and a new 
eternal gospel arise, which really forestalled Strauss who 
in 1871 raised the question, are we still Christians and 
answered it in the negative. Andrew Lang has inti- 
mated that ''men had magic before they had religion, 
and only invented gods because they found that magic 
did not work. Still later they invented science, which 
is only magic with a legitimate hypothesis, using real, 
not fanciful experiences. In the long run magic and 
religion are to die out, perhaps, and science is to have 
the whole field to herself." 

Kant has written ''our age is, in every sense of the 
word, the age of criticism, and everything must submit 
to it. Religion on the strength of its sanctity, and law 
on the strength of its majesty, try to withdraw them- 
selves from it; but by so doing they arouse just sus- 
picions and cannot claim that sincere respect which 
reason pays to those only who have been able to stand 
its free and open examination." A good many men 
would wish to take Christianity at its word, and are 
disappointed ; they feel like the boy who had toothache 
who asked God to take it away and as there was no relief 
he gave up his belief; no relief, no religion. 

Take this same book of Prof. Foster's which we have 
alluded to, "The Finality of the Christian Religion": 
it struggles and struggles, it defines and defines, it 
rehearses the history of events and imbues them with 
the meaning which its author preconceives they imply — 



134 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

after the usual fashion of philosophers who reintegrate 
the motions of events into formulas of plausible lucidity; 
it is written with learning, with thought, with wide 
fertility of resource in language but it proves nothing. 

The whole argument must be based on what is 
already given, and it is simply one man's way of looking 
at things already known. There are no new facts, no 
fresh communications, no new living voices ; it eliminates 
and eliminates, and leaves a residue of feeling, and that 
feeling still relying on a long past revelation or record. 
The feeling is charming and enticing enough, but feeling 
does not controvert or make plain the issue of events nor 
read God into a current of facts that seem godless. 

Were we to take up a discussion of crystallography 
we should at once enter upon a field of observation 
and experiment, and review a long list of ascertained 
facts, which would be new in many instances or at 
least irrefragably true. If we read a treatise on geology 
we know before we have turned a page that the cer- 
tainties of science are to be spread out before us, and we 
follow with undeviating and instructed attention the 
discussion and demonstration of recognizable facts. 

A work of history, of literary criticism may be written 
in a vein of apology, defence, or accusation, it may be 
wrong in tone, deceitful in deduction ; it may reflect the 
author's prejudice and place in unequal and positively 
false lights personages and events, and it may inculcate 
a philosophy of feeling, or elaborate a doctrine illegiti- 
mate or fanciful, but the events, the personages at any 
rate are real, their relations, their succession, the scenes 
they enact, the consequences they precipitate, are 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 135 

undeniable, and no matter in what mist of misconcep- 
tion we are invited to examine them, they are really 
there. 

It is not so long ago that Mr. Frazer in his remarkable 
book ''The Golden Bough," undertook to prove that 
the Christ of the Christian faith was the representative 
of a peculiar ceremony obtaining among the Babylon- 
ians and their Persian conquerors at a feast in spring- 
time. A condemned criminal was dressed in royal 
robes, enthroned, and at the end of five days whipped 
and hung. He was a proxy for the King — himself a 
divine incarnation — who thus vicariously disposed of — 
under some warrant for the necessity of renewing the 
king every year — was again allowed to reign for another 
year. This festival of Babylon was called the Sacaea. 
The Jews in captivity had become familiar with it and 
imported it into Jerusalem and it became the Purim 
and they borrowed the custom of whipping and hanging 
a mock king, a criminal in March. 

Very recently Kalthoff affirms that Christ was an 
ideal of a group of aspiring thinkers to whom the poor 
became embodied ''in a plastic form, in a typical ideal 
picture." The current of religious opinion swings from 
bank to bank, from agnosticism to theism and back 
again, but it is directed by internal influences of feeling 
only, and the banks themselves are less and less filled 
with opponents who disagree as in a matter of life and 
death, and are more and more filled with those who 
differ as a matter of culture. 

Mr. Balfour impeaches materialism, determinism, 
and thrusts upon it deserved retribution for its arro- 



136 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

gance and the convinced style of its utterance, but he 
cannot, for all that, furnish us with any other surety. 
Indeed for that matter Science might equally with 
religion welcome God's declaration of Himself in an 
unmistakable way according to the categories of sense 
and place itself unremittingly at his commands to 
record and perpetuate the Revelation. 

Plain people are as much bothered by the contradic- 
tions which the world of events gives to the doctrine of 
the loving imminence of God as the theologians are in 
their shifting soliloquies, perambulations, and rationaliz- 
ing elucidations. Prof. Foster's "the assent of our- 
selves — not to external authority, however good, but to 
ourselves — this is the beginning of certainty in what- 
ever region of life" is of no value, not the slightest, for 
in the question of God or no God, Immortality or No 
Immortality, Dogma or No Dogma, nothing will meet 
the requirements of the case but the PROOF, and such 
phrases as Prof. Foster's serve no other purpose than to 
loosen the strings of the imagination, and accord to 
every man according to convenience and temperament 
the opportunity to create a certainty deduced from his 
own experience, and limited by the restrictions of his 
own mind. 

And so far as the history of things oflers grounds for a 
conclusion, his certainty will be confessed doubting, 
misgivings, or denial. Only within a short time the 
poet Gerald Massey has abetted the growing literary 
efforts, designed to obliterate a unique source for 
Christian ethics, in his studies upon the "Sayings of 
Jesus shown to be Egyptian." Decline on all sides 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 137 

from a belief in the divinity of Christ to an absorption 
of his personaHty simply, to an interior resuscitation of 
his ideals, to a spirit of cosmopolitanized humanitarian- 
ism, which reflects him, marks the era of religious feel- 
ing we live in. And with this disintegration of belief 
among believers follows a stupendous growth of 
skepticism in all directions, with its concomitant 
effects of a denial of God, and the substitution of a 
mechanico-mental device in His place, and an utter 
abrogation of the hope of immortality. 

The Catholic fraternities of the Roman and English 
churches keep alive, more especially, old formulas and 
the honorable traditions of worship, and they seem 
to increase, though it is not a real enlargement; they 
grow from the retreat of those still anxious for positiv- 
ism in religion, who find a refuge in the wainscotted, 
illuminated, windowed, and altar aestheticism of an 
ancient poetic service, hallowed by time, by eloquence 
and by taste, and still raising aloft the standard of an 
impeccable guidance. 

Yet it is not a wicked age. It is an age of immense 
philanthropic power and activity; an age of usefulness 
and superb practicability. Its cultural aspects, its 
business aspects, its educational aspects are marvel- 
lously varied, stimulating, and successful, and they 
are, as summarized in these United States of America — 
the sole and single source for the inspiration and 
teaching of social reform — the realization of a new 
heaven upon earth. The workman lives here above the 
plane of the nobleman of the past, in his possession of 
sanitary comfort, and diversified diet, and sane and 



138 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

healthy clothes — and the ''submerged" are here brought 
within sight of the daylight of the upper air, and if they 
fall back into the dark waters of hebetude and slavery, 
it is the fault of caprice or surrender, of indolence or 
heredity. 

Shall we not ask with deserving hearts that God, if 
He exists, if He speaks, shall speak again, for while 
material happiness spreads and distributes its blessings 
through wider and wider, deeper and deeper areas of 
communal life, still a weariness of the spirit attends it, 
and the disheartening thought of the emptyness of 
living blanches courage or with corrupting ease eats 
away the heart of morality. We deserve well of God, 
for we, in this country at least, have put dignity into the 
lives of the commonest, and are working with unabated 
zeal to multiply the stations of intelligence, through 
freedom and competency and peace. And yet — the 
very limitations of living, the set boundaries of life, the 
effectual questions of daily sustenance and labor, and 
inevitable sickness and deprivation, hold back the 
sway of complete contentment, and puncture, as with 
knives, the cushioned self-satisfaction of our hearts. 
What does it all mean, what is the end; whither, 
whence, why? 

Certainly an illumination as to these things, some 
convincing voice, a new declaration of God himself, if 
that is possible, is desirable. We have Revelation and 
we have Philosophy, and we have the church, as it is 
called, but these seem slender props just now, when the 
ground on which they stand is so undermined, and the 
stepping centuries pass on, each with its fitful contribu- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 139 

tions of misery, horrors, and calamity; with us just now 
we have this incredible Russia, ''Red Russia" as Mr. 
John Foster Frazer calls it, "a hundred millions of 
modern men, exhibiting in the twentieth century the 
unreasoning frenzies of cave-dwellers, forgetting all 
motives, understandable by civilized beings, and filling 
the land with ravin," and not a sound from the deaf 
heavens, or a movement among the rulers of the earth 
to stop it, and in it all a Church, and its vice-regent 
and embodiment — the Czar — still insisting in their 
warrant of infallibility. 

Well these three are insufficient or appear so. The 
Revelations are discussed in the succeeding chapter, 
also the Church, and now as to Philosophy. 

It is not clear under what image Philosophy presents 
itself. Should we seem to see a classic figure wearing a 
crown of light holding the key of knowledge, with out- 
stretched finger pointing to a straight path of belief and 
conduct, or might she seem wan cheeked with aching 
eyes, trembling hands, and a vesture torn and mended, 
from whose lips the words of guidance fall with indeci- 
sion, while she holds many keys, that she foolishly 
fumbles when we ask her for the one that unlocks the 
door of truth — or does a collective or plural image 
express Philosophy more wisely? Is it a throng, we see, 
of claimants, many voiced, and jostling each other, 
with eager importunity, their hands upraised and offer- 
ing to us many things, the tolerant and discrete he- 
donism of Epicurus, the asceticism of the Stoics, the 
play of ideas and ideals of Plato, the solid earth of 
Aristotle, the mysticism of the Religious, a garish 



140 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

Eclecticism, or the pallid and vanishing Idealisms, the 
subtle fascination of Pragmatism, or cold and torpid 
Indifference, or the ironies and savageness of Material- 
ists and Pessimists? Here in the clustering and babel- 
voiced rout is a smiling Romanticism, amused and 
contemplative, with no clue to offer, but only singing 
the distiches of its playful criticism, or there the wistful 
gaze of Science, deaf to the clamors of schools, and only 
fixing its eyes and thought on the panorama of an evolv- 
ing universe. 

If we ask Philosophy, or the Philosophers, for some 
assurance as to God, they, or it, offer guesses, that take 
on a severity of conviction with some, or are as mildly 
colored with misgivings in others, or we are utterly 
repelled, and only the blank stare, the rapid repudia- 
tion, or an unwelcome grin receive our inquiry. 

Now in a recent work of Prof. Rogers, who adopts a 
really concessional attitude to our hopes, the existence 
of God is defended though there is no rigor of demon- 
stration, and the theory advances under a cloud of 
hovering '*ifs and ands." But the argument is progres- 
sive, and it frankly starts at the beginning. He says 
at the opening of his book, ''The Religious Conception 
of the World," that he "refers substantially to such a 
manner of conceiving the universe of reality in its large 
and essential character, as the general sound intelligence 
and common sense of the religious community would be 
able to take up in imagination with some measure of 
concreteness and objectivity, and recognize as the 
natural understanding of the historical Christian reve- 
lation." 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 141 

But Prof. Rogers is surely not right in the outset, if 
he thinks people cannot live with tolerable and tolerat- 
ing equipoise, without a precise conviction on the 
subject ; that it is not, in later periods of development — 
these last in which we live — '*a tremendously vital 
instinct, in the presence of which the attacks of the 
individual or the band of philosophic iconoclasts seem 
rather puny and powerless." We doubt it, and because 
we doubt it, this Plan, on a Christian basis of attain- 
ment, is here proposed. It is indisputable that great 
numbers of people are quite satisfied to dispense with 
much active religious belief today, as long as they can 
enjoy, in a measurable way the indulgence of their 
tastes, their aptitudes or their ambitions. And it has 
been curiously asserted in a recent work on Japan that 
with the Japanese, ''religion is an extraneous matter, 
comprehending nothing like the transforming of the 
human consciousness, and not discovering the existence 
or even the need of a Great First Cause or Supreme 
Being." 

It can be allowed that the fullest contentment in 
life, the best filling out of its range of feeling, and the 
deepest culture of its higher affinity or tendency, is 
secured through religious faith or practices but it does 
not follow that if, for any reason, adequate or inade- 
quate, religious belief is weakened or abandoned, men 
and women cannot so reconstitute their conscious rela- 
tion to each other, and to the world about them, as to 
yield to them satisfaction and good reasons for serenity 
and happiness. Certainly Philosophy will not restore 
religious convictions, though it may with plausible 



142 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

force, increase the considerations that give them 
endurance and attractiveness and rationality. And 
quite as certainly a method of Revelation, as herein 
sought, might without argument or subtleties of dialec- 
tic, of the technical ingenuities of the philosophers, 
reawaken the religious instinct by a direct transmission 
of, so to speak, supernatural facts, and reconsolidate 
the scattered impulses to faith and endow our suscepti- 
bilities with an old-time fervor. Philosophy would not 
in any case do it, for Philosophy is only understood, is 
only listened to by a group of trained minds, conferring 
in stimulating solitudes, and so attuned by meditation 
to a range of ideas, and to a vocabulary of precision, 
that the substance of their deliberations can only belong 
to an utterly unimportant, and numerically a very 
minute portion of the earth's population. And at the 
best these thinkers only frame a reasonable ''hypothe- 
sis." 

Prof. Rogers beautifully, under limitations perhaps 
truthfully, says ''if human life becomes slowly settled, 
harmonious, and self-justifying, when w^e act upon the 
assumption that the universe has a certain ideal consti- 
tution, then we have the same right, in kind if not in 
degree, to accept this as a verification of our faith, as we 
have to accept the progressive discovery of regularities 
in perceptual experience as a verification of our 
originally blind faith in order and reason." 

But is this verification so conclusive, when, looking 
from ourselves perchance — if our station abounds in 
satisfying and natural joys — we see the harsh ordeals of 
life, or hear the cries of an incessant greed, watch the 



THE WORLD^S PRAYER 143 

"dull uniformity of mischief," or note crushing weights 
of misery? Would not Prof, Rogers himself welcome a 
new affirmation by God himself, which too, let us prefer, 
should not diminish the beauty and the interest of the 
wonder-world about us, but which might make less 
hazardous to our minds, to our scientific intellect, the 
hypothesis of a God. Prof. Rogers himself says ''our 
whole argument rests upon two postulates, or prejudices, 
if one chooses so to call them; and while these can be 
made to seem reasonable in the light of a developed 
experience, they can in the nature of the case be sub- 
mitted to no decisive test," and indeed without dwell- 
ing on it. Prof. Rogers* hypothesis of God's relations to 
man would not be generally, we think, acceptable, nor 
indeed, with vraisimilitude, quite thinkable. 



CHAPTER VI 
The Two Revelations 

Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution 
explained his deepest convictions when he wrote, "we 
know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his 
constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, 
not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it can 
not prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot, and 
in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of 
the alembic of hell, we should uncover our nakedness, 
by throwing off that Christian religion which has 
been hitherto our boast and comfort, and one great 
source of civilization amongst us, and among many other 
nations; we are apprehensive (being well aware that the 
mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, perni- 
cious and degrading superstition might take place of it.'* 

Today the world seems likely to lose its dogmatic 
faith, but it is not nearly so apparent that superstition 
will take its place, unless the stupid spiritualistic cults, 
the tepid shallowness of Christian Science, and mere 
political and social nostrums may be so interpreted in 
this uncomplimentary vein. We seem rather to be 
reverting to a Lucretian frame of mind, accepting no 
interventions, tolerating no supervisions, credulous in 
our devotion to Nature, and sapiently careless of any- 
thing more or less important than Systems of Nomen- 
clature, and Origins of Species. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 145 

Certainly it is an overpowering reflection, that we are 
placed in a world of perversity and confusion, from some 
points of view, of sobriety and enforced legality from 
others, but at any and all times an essentially unknown 
world. Philosophy has pretty well convinced us that 
we do not, cannot, receive the real nature of objects out- 
side of us, foreign to us, which come to us only as sensuous 
impressions, and these qualified, or actually created by 
subjective mental or nervous conditions; that we live 
in a world simply mirrored to us from our own minds, 
and that no thought could be more hopeless or extrava- 
gant than to suppose we can introduce that world into 
our consciousness, except by the second-hand study of 
conscious perceptions, and that while millions of ob- 
servers may see the same things in a porphyritic rock, 
their agreement in sensation has no inevitable weight as 
to telling us what the so-called porphyry is. 

This sense of bewilderment deepens into despair, or 
might — were it a matter of intellectual concern to us — 
when we turn from the invading claims of stones and 
animals, sky and earth, to the thoughts concerning our 
essence, our destiny, our authorization, our use; and 
regarding, from a philosophic necessity, the imperative 
value of a closed circuit of elucidation, we should feel 
that a system of this sort, unexplained, or inexplicable, 
was deeply infected with an illogical taint. 

The only saving chain of experiences would be in a 
Revelation, for from the established conclusions of 
philosophy, we cannot determine certainty ourselves. 
Philosophy with great talents seems after all absurdly 
feeble. Mallock speaking of Spencer's strange but 



146 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

partial reversion from his own results in philosophy 
says, "of all the saddening reflections which the 
approach of death suggested to him, the most saddening 
was the reflection that there might, at the back of the 
universe, be no consciousness at all but merely a species 
of groping protoplasmic mind which breaks into transi- 
tory consciousness in feeble units like ourselves." 

A revelation might not be complete, nor indeed, in a 
strict sense, of any scientific value, but it might, in the 
one particular of our eternal relations, be more or less 
explicit, at least so far, as to enable us to go on living 
with patience and with expectation. Well; there are for 
us Indo-Europeans, occupants of Europe and America, 
two such revelations, and because of them, critics of this 
Plan will protest, that we do not need a third. Whether 
we do or do not is then the subject of this chapter. 

If the revelations pointed to by Christians as indubit- 
able documents of divine origin, viz. the Old and the 
New Testaments are really such, then at once we can 
infer that revelations, like schools of art and systems 
of politics, while having contents permanently fixed for 
all time, derive a color, an emotional aroma, as the 
phrase goes, and employ agents, suitable for the times 
to which they minister, that they attain veracity for 
these, if they reflect their temper, or gather in them- 
selves episodes and actors and sentiments, that har- 
monize with the temperament and culture of the day. 
A revelation therefore like any other temporal incident 
may be looked at from several points of view, some of 
them purely ''profane" or secular, others hermeneutical 
and religious, and the value or authenticity of the latter 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 147 

will vary in a relative way to the credence given in the 
revelation to the former. 

If from a profane or secular standpoint, the state- 
ments in a Revelation are incredible, then the symbolic 
or moral meanings, blended with, or derivative from 
them must participate sensibly in their weakness. If a 
messenger carried to a beleaguered city the announce- 
ment that the commander of the besieging forces was 
an incorporeal and an invisible spirit, his words might — 
and today certainly would — receive less attention if in 
the same breath he asserted that in the camp he had 
left, water flowed uphill, and stones thrown into the 
air continued their flight upward, until lost to sight and, 
presumably unarrested at the confines of the earth's 
atmosphere, they passed outward into space. And yet it 
is clear enough that in certain phases of mental develop- 
ment the combination of the miraculous happenings 
with the supersensual claims of the hostile chief would 
seem absolutely congruous, and form a union of con- 
ceptions properly impregnated throughout with wonder 
and mystery. The fealty to a revelation will have, 
must have, something to do with the relevancy of its 
secular contents to the mental, emotional and moral 
impressionability of its auditors. The revelations we 
are considering do not for this day and generation 
assume quite such a congruity. 

Without considering all the implications of the two 
Christian revelations it is sufficient to attribute to the 
first — the Old Testament — the revelation of a God, to 
the second — the New Testament — the revelation of a 
Saviour, and an individual Immortality. 



148 THE WORLD^S PRAYER 

Now this age has attained a pretty well grounded 
belief in a classified series of facts relating to the 
material organization of this earth and its past geologi- 
cal history: it is further imbued with an almost stolid 
and unshakable faith in the irrevocable persistency of 
natural law: it is wonderfully learned in the processes 
of life and matter, and it cultivates an interior logic of 
apprehension that condemns deceit, and the innuendoes 
of round-about and apologetic explanations. The first 
revelation bearing its message, august and majestic, 
encloses it in a group of affirmations that the modern 
mind refuses to believe, and when the scrutiny of 
scholars is fastened on the document itself, and their 
sharp witted criticism is permitted to play over its 
pages they emphatically declare that it is a mixture of 
documents, that much of it is ethnic myth, that the 
traditional views of its authorship and the assumed 
chronological order of its parts are demonstrably wrong. 

The very opening chapter of the Old Testament 
dismays the literal scientific mind, and, as it was for a 
long time regarded by the Church, it would still con- 
tinue to dismay it. Taken in its literal sense it is 
immediately relegated to the impossible and the 
absurd, and although as a Cosmogony it is immensely 
superior, and more intelligent, than those afforded by 
the inventions of other cultivations than the Israelitic, 
it utterly fails in exactness. 

It has an evolutionary bias, and should merit well 
from an unprejudiced perusal, as a rather advanced 
type of cosmological imagery. But the picture that 
succeeds it, of the Garden of Eden and the story of the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 149 

derivation of Eve and the conversations and relations 
of the occupants of the Garden and God are today 
regarded with an averted glance by the orthodox, even, 
and to the rest of the world become a transparent rebus 
of poetic symbols. 

Francis Bacon centuries ago alluded to the ''extreme 
levity" of those who endeavored to extract a "system of 
philosophy from the first chapter of Genesis," although 
such a stricture is misleading, as the chapter has sub- 
limity, and one of the commonplaces of literature is 
the just admiration of Longinus for the simple and preg- 
nant utterance of its imposing conceptions. The Old 
Testament certainly begins with an uncompromising 
amplitude of distinctness and authority; *'in the 
beginning God created the heavens and the earth"; 
but when the glass of philological criticism is suspended 
over this extraordinary writing, two narratives are 
revealed, one of which affirms Yahweh or Jahveh to be 
the originator of all things, the second, intertwined 
with the first, but occupying the first chapter of Genesis 
exclusively, referring the origins to Elohim, a plural 
noun meaning ''powers," gods; and sceptical students 
instantly assure us that the plural deity is perhaps the 
later, representing the influence of Babylonian quasi- 
science, while Yahweh they insist (it might be sug- 
gested that their insistence is often very much like 
intemperate and obstinate guessing, under the impetus 
of a fever of slavish doubting) was a Thunder God or 
Nature God (Winckler, Tiele) because the same word 
is applied to the apparition of Samuel in the story 
of the Witch of Endor. 



150 THE WORLD^S PRAYER 

We are thus landed, after further deductions and 
rather aphoristic surmises in the conception, that 
''the Hebrews are a group of agricultural and pastoral 
but warlike tribes of Semitic speech with household 
gods and local deities, living among communities at the 
same or a higher culture state" (Robertson), that the 
cult of Yahweh was not a primordial creed but a 
''successful tyranny of one local cult over others" 
(Robertson) ; that (Winckler, Meyer) it was not even 
at first established in Palestine, but derived from 
Sinaitic influences and that, far on in time, after the 
first fathers or patriarchs of Israel had disappeared, and 
when kings ruled in Israel, the Yahweh symbol became 
regnant, while (rather self-disparagingly) Robertson 
says "the inveterate usage in the Bible-making period, 
of forging and interpolating ancient or pretended 
writings, makes it impossible to construct any detailed 
history of the rise of Yahwism." 

With this destructive invasion of the verbal construc- 
tion of the initial narrative of the revelation, and an 
uneasy sense of its indeterminate and unsatisfactory 
accordance with scientific truth, we confront the pic- 
ture of the Garden of Eden, and halt wonder stricken 
before a plain work of imagination and poetic allegory. 
While for the purposes of revelation, leniently con- 
sidered, the poem had its instructive and didactic uses, 
and might, along the early stages of ethnic and ethical 
development, enforce an ennobling concession to the 
vindictive supremacy of Sin, and inflame the ardor of 
resentment and rebuke at its effects ; yet to be accepted 
now as a historic incident summarizing a theological 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 151 

solution of the moral problem is a most mad and 
hazardous design. 

And surely when we open the pages of modern com- 
parative religious studies we are not permitted long to 
dally with any illusions as to its unique and incompar- 
able quality. It has been alluded to by Lyman Abbott 
as *'a myth of wonderful beauty," and he also says that 
it "disappears from the face of the earth absolutely, and 
never again is mentioned in the sacred history, or in any 
other." But we are not long left in ignorance as to the 
worship of trees, and the early assumption of a sacred 
character by the woods and trees, in whose shadowy 
recesses and amid whose whispering arms a world of 
occult wonder seemed to have its habitation. Sayce 
tells us that (Hibbert Lectures), **the primitive house of 
Tammuz (a Babylonian Deity) had been in that garden 
of Edin or Eden which Babylonian tradition placed in 
the immediate vicinity of Eridu (an ancient holy city 
of precedence and great dignity), where 

A stalk grew, over-shadowing: In a holy place did it 

grow: 
Its root was of white crystal, which stretched towards 

the deep:" 

which Sayce reminds us recalls the famous Yggdrasill 
of Norse mythology, the world tree, whose roots de- 
scend into the world of death while its branches rise into 
Asgard, the heaven of the Gods.* 

*As an example of the disillusions enforced by modern profound research, in 
Mr. R. C. Thompson's The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, wherein this 
industrious and delving student has revealed the meanings of the so-called 
"evil spirit texts," we find for instance that a tablet in the British Museum — 
which was supposed, and confidently referred to, as containing an allusion to 
the Garden of Eden, has nothing to do with that paradise, and that the tree 
mentioned on it, interpreted as the Tree of Life, is the kish-kanu plant which 
grew in Eridu, and was assumed to have magical properties. 



152 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

There does indeed seem then to be something con- 
nected with the Eden fable of a purely and rather 
unique character, which might lead us to attribute to it 
a kind of esoteric meaning, not inaptly allied to revela- 
tion. But it is certmnly fable, and just as certainly it 
has been regarded as history, and expositions of learned 
men have dwelt upon its uses and application. Now 
this is disconcerting, and a disquieting disillusion 
remains, after we have gotten to our last position of 
amiable and admiring sufferance. A revelation begin- 
ning with the origins of human life, in a religious sense, 
should we think possess an indubitable and finished 
exactitude, or at least not be of such stuff as to take on 
the chameleon tints of history and fable according to the 
varying lights of credulity or scholarship. We derive 
an uneasy feeling of mercantile accommodation, as 
involved in its prescriptions and reluctantly succumb 
to the impressions of a shadowy rebuke of deception. 
Allegory and parable hardly take the place of facts, in a 
momentous narrative dealing with ultimate theological 
verities, and w^hile we can willingly suspend judgment, 
knowing all the disabilities of the early ages of faith and 
ethnic opaqueness, we do confess to a complete willing- 
ness to receive more light, asserting that mere exegesis 
and the play of decorative apologies will not compensate 
for the unapparelled truth. It has been the boast of 
Protestantism to make the Bible preeminent and in- 
fallible, to erect it into a source of dogma contrarient 
to the inspiration and authority of the Papacy; but 
here, at the very beginning, we feel that "the Protestant 
dogma of the infallibihty of the Bible, is not only 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 153 

inconceivable in thought — it is also useless in fact" 
(Sabatier). 

i\nd no sooner have we recovered from a strange 
wonderment and partial revolt over the Eden story, 
than our eyes peruse the anomalous narrative of the 
Flood, with its protagonist Noah, and the impossible 
assemblage of its creatures, the submerged earth, and 
the impracticable barn of an ark, and sinking back into 
a labyrinth of disturbing queries, which this story 
awakens, we encounter the manifold versions of the 
same story as a traditional possession of many early 
civilizations. This indeed could be interpreted as 
corroborative of the Bible statement, but the Bible 
statement remains impugned nevertheless for its im- 
possible and legendary features, which give to it some- 
how an aggravating expression of juvenile fragility. 
When we widen our scope of contemplation, and follow 
the sacred theme through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, 
Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, the books especi- 
ally dealing with the rise and establishment of the 
Jewish religion, and enclosing the germinal tracts of 
revelation, we can scarcely arise from our study, 
provided as we may be with the research results of 
modern Hebrew scholars and orientalists, without feel- 
ing that for the requirements of an enlightened faith, a 
new, a modern revelation would seem deeply and 
critically necessary. 

The sense of disturbance, the fluctuating uneasiness 
of our reliance on the events described in these pages of 
the Bible, brought about by the sharp dissonance of 
modern feeling with archaic conditions, is quite 



154 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

seriously heightened when we realize that it appears 
conceded that the Pentateuch has been misconceived 
and ignorantly understood. In the first place it is not 
the work of Moses, as was implicitly believed for so 
many years, and that if there were Mosaic fragments 
in it, they formed part of a patchwork compiled or 
redacted from several sources, and put together or 
edited at a period, centuries later than the date of the 
assumed author's life and death, and that that redac- 
tion is composite, and bears the mark of many hands, 
is indeed, to quote Kuenen, from ''the sacerdotal 
corporation of Jerusalem." 

In fact, it appears that the prevalent view among 
scholars makes the prophecies chronologically precede 
the priestly legislation (Leviticus), and the priestly 
historiography (Genesis, Exodus). Now while there is 
a sure consensus among scholars as to the composite 
character of the biblical narrative, contained in the so- 
called Pentateuch (viz. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, 
Numbers, and Deuteronomy) and there seems to have 
developed among them the conviction, which rests in 
their minds upon irrefragable proof, that much of the 
Pentateuch was composed during or after the Exile, 
(viz. the transference of the Hebrews to Babylon), the 
precise constitution of these books is not accordantly 
agreed upon. 

The first adherents of the newer views, with regard to 
the authorship and composition of the Pentateuch, were 
inclined to allow the existence of the ''Book of Origins," 
(the earlier Elohist), or "Grundschrift," in which were 
"embedded still more ancient fragments, some of them 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 155 

Mosaic," and that "the Deuteronomist, a contempor- 
ary of Manasseh or Josiah, was the redactor of the 
Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, and it was he who 
brought them into the form in which they now He 
before us. He interwove or inserted his own laws and 
narrative into the work of the Yahweh (Jehovist) that 
dated from the eighth century B. C, and was therefore 
about a hundred years old" (Kuenen). 

But as early as 1860 Kuenen confesses to a doubt as 
to the correctness of the above position, and his sus- 
picions were repeated in the minds of other students. 
The assumption outlined above incorporated the tacit 
concession that the Pentateuch preceded the Psalms 
and the Prophets, and antedated the years of the Exile 
of the People of Israel. The so-called "Erganzunghy- 
pothesis" or filling in hypothesis, insisted that the 
original groundwork of the Hexateuch was to be found 
in the body of Elohistic passages, and belonged to a 
single author — while the Yahwistic and deuteronomic 
laws and legends were later additions. This view was 
invalidated by the trenchant criticism of Bishop Col- 
enso of Natal, who, besides, as Kuenen says ''applying 
the test of those universal laws of time and space from 
which no chain of phenomena can escape," pointed out 
that the hitherto unassailed ''grundschrift" is utterly 
untrustworthy, and while rejecting its chronological 
priority, he led the way by his ''pulverizing criticism," 
to its keener scrutiny, which process of examination 
conducted by Popper, Geiger, Graf, finally landed 
biblical criticism in views immensely more radical and 
disintegrating in their influence upon traditional rever- 
ence for the "scriptures." 



156 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

For now it was perceived and restated in various 
ways, with individual modifications that much, if not all, 
of the material composing the "grundschrift" was 
comparatively recent, and the compilation of one or 
several hands as late as Ezra, or even subsequent to 
450 B. C, that the historical portions of the grund- 
schrift involved an identical workmanship with the 
priestly legislation, and that the account of creation, so 
instinctively given priority, issues from the same 
historiographic impulse that recorded the Priestly 
Codex, and that internal evidence established the fact 
that the priestly legislation recorded, was not contem- 
poraneous, so far as its essential elements could be 
anticipated, with the events to which it was referred. 

Again the two accounts of the Creation, of the Flood, 
of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Joseph 
coming into Egypt, of the name Israel and other in- 
stances reveal the composite character of the Genesis 
chapters, which is supported by linguistic differences, 
and indicate a late period of arrangement and composi- 
tion. 

Kuenen remarks that ''the representations in the 
later books of the Hexateuch simply defy the conditions 
of space and time to which every event is subject, and 
by which therefore, every narrative may be tested. 
The exodus, the wandering, the passage of the Jordan 
and the settlement in Canaan, as they are described in 
the Hexateuch, simply could not have happened. We 
strive in vain to conceive their occurrence as long as 
we retain the data of the Hexateuch itself"; ''this 
representation of the course of events is not sporadic, 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 157 

but appears throughout, and is sometimes rounded into 
a complete system which at first produces the impres- 
sion of an accurate reflex of the facts, but, when we 
discover that it cannot possibly be such, must be sup- 
posed to owe its origin to the constructive imagination 
which works upon unhistorical premises as readily as 
though they were facts"; "they show the unmistakable 
traces of the condensing and concentrating process that 
must have preceded their committal to writing: and this 
fresh confirmation of their later origin serves at the 
same time to explain the unhistorical presentation of 
the facts which we have noted, and which could not but 
result from such a process of evolution" (Kuenen). 

In Kuenen's learned and energetic analysis of the 
Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, as in the pains- 
taking treatises of all the scholars, we have presented 
to us a wondrously minute picking out of corres- 
pondences and discrepancies in paragraphs or verses, 
which can only be compared to the solicitous scrutiny of 
a microscopist over a sectionized rock, or over the 
divergent developments of a fertilized egg. 

It seems certainly very honest and mercilessly un- 
sparing of the redactor's time and patience, but in 
innumerable details there is so much contradiction and 
variance of inference, among these devoted men that 
while their main conclusions perhaps remain unshaken 
they do not always force us to a single result, as to all of 
its parts. They disclose much interpolation, altera- 
tion, revision; and the inadvertencies, inconsistencies, 
and variability of the narratives in the Pentateuch are 
made to appear endless. The Deuteronomist is the 



158 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

arch culprit in this matter, and to him is due the join- 
ture of the sacred books, their contents and manipula- 
tion, though we are assured that "there is no evidence 
that the Deuteronomist and his followers were ac- 
quainted with the priestly law and narrative." 

The prophets are given precedence, and made the 
first in time of the written books, because they offer no 
evidence of an acquaintance with a written law. 
As Kuenen considers it, "at least five centuries had 
elapsed since the time of Moses, when these prophets 
flourished, whose writings we still possess. A Mosaic 
law book, rendered venerable by its origin and high 
antiquity, and itself laying claim to a quite exception- 
able authority must have been constantly cited and 
upheld against the people by any teachers who recog- 
nized it. But there is not a trace." 

The connexion of Ezekiel is made closer than that of 
any other prophet with the Hexateuch. Jeremiah has 
been regarded by some authorities as the Deuterono- 
mist himself, but others reject it. The Minor prophets, 
Amos, Hosea, are early, the Psalms, Proverbs, and Job, 
Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, similarly are early, and 
antedate the tor a viz., the Pentateuch, as to their 
canonical and finished form. It may be generally 
believed that the Mosaic tora was in existence as early 
as the middle of the fifth century B. C, and that the 
ordinances were then principally put in practice 
through the influence of Ezra and Nehemiah. 
As to the two elemental strains of revelation, the 
Yahwistic and the Elohistic, these documents were 
composed within the ninth or at the beginning of the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 159 

eighth century B. C. Both were well received but 
they underwent expansion and were recast at a period 
later than 650; viz., the Jahvistic and Elohistic 
documents were combined into a single whole. 

But we are not simply disconcerted in our preconcep- 
tions as to the relativity and authority of the five 
primary books of the Old Testament, by the students, 
but we are tempted with much argument and demon- 
stration to believe many other things which transform 
our revelation, in part at least, into a chronicle of 
ethnic mythology and bring it with bewildering sudden- 
ness into some sort of a counterpart to the legends and 
anthropomorphic nature cults of early races. 

We are told that David was a Semitic deity, that Saul 
and Solomon also were God-names, as was Samuel, that 
Samson is a solar myth, that Jacob and Joseph were 
Old Canaanitish deities, that Moses was a name for 
more than one Semitic god, and '*in particular stood for 
a Sun-God," that Abraham and Isaac ''appear to be 
ancient deities," that Joshua and Elijah and Elisha 
were all derivative from solar embodiments (Sayce, 
Hitzig, Lenormant, Winckler, quoted by Robertson) 
and before these disturbing theories (for after all a 
little consideration shows them to be little else) we feel 
the sacred sheen of interest and the sanctity of age lose 
their brightness, and decline into a commonplace 
obscurity not quite assuring. 

We are further shown, or at least with learned plausi- 
bility we are patiently taught, to reflect that monothe- 
ism was not an aboriginal possession of the Jews, that 
they shared it with other Semitic tribes, that Yahweh 



160 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

was "symbolized and worshipped in the image of a 
young bull, a usage associated with the neighboring 
Semitic cult of Moloch," that it arose in the midst of 
rival practices, and consummated its later predomin- 
ance by purely secular means, that indeed so much 
assigned to the Hebrews as elevated in religious dogma 
was of late origin, and not unlikely engendered by 
contact with other civilizations to whom the prestige 
of any revelation is not conceded, and indeed, in the 
course of these sweeping destructions of orthodox 
formularies, the belief of any considerable enslavement 
of the Jews in Egypt is scouted by the most recent 
analysts. 

The supremacy of Jerusalem as the earthly dwelling 
place of Jehovah was a late innovation and might be 
considered as the victory of an especial class of religion- 
ists, or of an influential clan. There had been a temple 
at Shiloh, Mt. Ephraim, Bochin, Ophra, Mocpha, 
Bethel, Rana, Gilgal, Bethlehem, Hebron, Arauna, 
Gibeon, and long after the building of the temple at 
Jerusalem the same liberty prevailed. Indeed we seem 
to be shown a group of Northern Semites influenced by 
the Assyrian or Babylonian religion with traditions of 
uncertain origin assuming a monotheistic faith through 
the individual earnestness and the zeal of the prophets : 
**this prophetic movement" says Tiele, ''gave rise to a 
religious sect or nomistic religion, the foundations of 
which were firmly laid before the captivity, by the 
code prepared under Josiah, and during the captivity 
and after it by Ezekiel and the priestly legislation, and 
which was organized, chiefly by Ezra as a priestly com- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 161 

munity"; and we are elsewhere unreservedly assured 
that at the commencement the subject of man's origin 
had its abode in the divinity schools; it was taught by 
theologians; the opening chapters of Genesis con- 
stituted the accepted text-book; now in 1905 the sub- 
ject is assigned to the anthropological laboratory. 

And of course when we have gotten through all this 
we are a little aghast, and become reflective and 
melancholy and the craving cry for another revelation 
becomes urgent and reasonable. 

Dr. George Adam Smith (Modern Criticism and the 
Preaching of the Old Testament) has said that the 
Higher Criticism is to a remarkable extent corroborated 
by the evidence of archaeology and geography, and that 
the internal evidence supporting it is almost irrefutable, 
and that in the verbal inspection indefatigably con- 
strued — phraseology, interests, religious conceptions 
and historical traditions reveal four main documents, 
**all the more distinct that they often present the same 
subjects or events in different ways," but which con- 
vince us that 'Ve are in touch, not with phantasms of 
modern scholarship, but with ancient realities, the 
original constituents of our curiously composite Scrip- 
tures. Discrepancies, fatal to the traditional theory, 
will explain themselves: the history, instead of being 
full of contradictions, will fall into the lines of a reason- 
able development, and the Divine education of Isreal 
become more apparent than ever." 

Dr. Smith claims an indemnity for these rearrange- 
ments, dislocations and subversions, and says with 
uncommon skill ''consider how all else lies before us 



162 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

unquestioned by criticism. Unquestioned? I should 
rather say fortified, explored, illuminated, made habit- 
able for modern men. The labors of the prophets, the 
doom and Fall of Northern Israel, the carriage of 
Jerusalem through her awful crisis upon the solitary 
faith of Isaiah; his victory; the reaction under Manas- 
seh, and the recrudescence of heathenism; the dis- 
covery of Deuteronomy and the reforms of Josiah ; the 
confidence of the people in an external righteousness, 
and their disillusionment by Josiah's tragic death at 
Megiddo: the second reaction to heathenism under 
Jehoiakim; the story of the Exile and of the Return; 
the brilliant hopes and their disappointment; the 
struggle with foreign tyrants and native traitors, for 
the nation's purity and loyalty to God; the growth of 
legalism and of the sweet personal piety which grew 
behind the Law like a garden of lilies within a hedge of 
thorns ; the story of the Diaspora, and of contact with 
alien systems of culture and religion; the story of 
righteous suffering in meditation upon its meaning; 
the rise of speculation and of the schools of the teachers, 
who applied the fear of Jahweh and the wisdom which 
springs from it to the every day life of men. No 
historical criticism takes away these fields from the 
preacher of today. Across them he may move with all 
the confidence and boldness of the fathers — nay with 
more freshness, more insight, more agility, for the text is 
clearer, the discrepancies explained, the allusions better 
understood and all the old life requickened, out of 
which those prophets and reformers, those psalmists and 
wise men, with all their literature originally sprung." 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 163 

This is doubtless all true, but something has van- 
ished. The strange and terror stricken sense that the 
proclamation of a God comes from the outer realms of 
divine consciousness and therefore carries with it an 
unqualified certainty, no matter how much the affairs 
of life bring it into temporary discredit, has gone. And 
this certainty is precisely the only thing that meets the 
requirements of an incessant skepticism. That there 
are virtue and beauty and high sentiments and inspiring 
thoughts and a genial symbolism and the play of 
didactic imagery in the Bible, will not answer alone. 

It is not an apodictical assertion we are after but an 
assertion unprovable, yet from the circumstances and 
the source of its utterance absolute and final. We do 
not wish, nor can we endure to think, with Dr. Lyman 
Abbott that Moses becomes a ''shadowy figure, so far 
in the remote past that in studying the details of his life 
it is impossible scientifically to separate the legendary 
from the historical." 

We are disturbed, and rightly so, when Mr. Boscawen 
for instance tells us (The First of Empires) that Ezra 
and his "Great Synagogue" ''drew largely upon Baby- 
lonian legends of the Creation and Flood for the narra- 
tives which they narrated or edited, and that Babylonian 
literature has an antiquity some two or three thousand 
years greater than that of the writings which are attri- 
buted to Moses, and even of the oldest portions of them." 

It is no satisfaction, at least for the moral intensity of 
our hopes, to ruminate with Prof. George Santayana 
that "the earlier Hebrews, as their own records depict 
them, had a mythology and cultus extremely like that of 



164 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

other Semi tic people — that their religion consisted in local 
rites, in lunar feasts, in sooth-sayings and oracles, in 
legends about divine apparitions commemorated in the 
spots they had made holy. These spots, as in all the rest of 
the world, were tombs, wells, great trees, and, above 
all, the tops of mountains. Scripture was codified, 
proclaimed and given out formally to be inspired by 
Jehovah and written by Moses." 

It is not desirable for our peace of mind to accept the 
mellow resignation of Dr. Abbott when he contentedly 
murmurs ''the hypothesis that the unknown writer of 
Genesis took these early legends and rewrote them, writ- 
ing God into them , or that the people retold them , with the 
national consciousness of God wrought into them, is far 
more probable and quite as spiritual as the hypothesis 
that these narratives were supernaturally revealed to 
the historian, or that they were miraculously preserved 
and handed down from generation to generation until 
they reached him as an infallible record of events long 
anterior"; all of which is nonsense. 

No! without a revelation this question whether 
there is a God or not is unanswered and unanswerable, 
and a revelation dissolved away into an ordinary dae- 
monic and ethnic tale, the legitimate companion piece 
of all other racial speculations, however much more 
august in moral dignity and poetic suasion, will not 
satisfy the insufferable challenge of the suffering world, 
of which suffering perhaps Dr. Abbott knows little. 
Let God speak once more, or let us with dreaming and 
tearful eyes turn again to the ''Riddle of the World," 
and finally with composure fix a new solution. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 165 

And as to the New Testament does it as a revelation 
need renewal? Or more gently shall we ask, does it 
need restatement? We are not long left in doubt if we 
turn to contemporaneous studies, that the central and 
supernatural fact of the New Testament revelation — 
the divine Sonship of Christ — is denied, and has for 
thousands and thousands become a myth. 

We soon confront an aggressive criticism besides, 
which, with its textual analysis throws the gospels into 
some confusion, and at least on the fourth — St. John's — 
empties a flood of conjecture that makes it appear 
something like a foreign and discordant invention, 
saturated with alien mysticism and snatching only from 
the commonplace synoptic gospels suggestions which 
have been elaborated into a neo-platonic poem. 

Christianity like Hebraism has been thrust down into 
the classes of natural phenomena and subordinated to 
the world-wide ethico-religious impulses of men; and 
all the elements of supernaturalism, the statements of 
transcendental import exactingly ejected or confidently 
scored as fiction. In a few cases this has been done 
with a relentless enmity to the person of Christ, more 
widely with reverent care to his unique nature but 
with an unabashed and insistent scientific objectivity. 

For instance such a work as M. Ernest Havet's Le 
Christianisme et ses Origines, voluminously (and a little 
wearisomely) struggling through Grecian, Roman and 
Jewish thought upon a search of paramount interest to 
discover how far the sentiments of Christianity had 
been already anticipated and disseminated like a 
conciliatory fragrance through national apprehensions, 



166 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

bows to the inherent beauty of the Prophet and his 
system, but places both in the class of rational and logi- 
cal events and fights hard to diminish the individualistic 
meaning and elevation of Christ himself. 

He especially engages the problem of showing how 
deeply the soil of Gentile conceptions and feelings was 
prepared for, or already grew, the flowers of Christian 
hopes and sentiments. "Sans discuter ni combattre les 
doctrines, je m'attachais a montrer que la revolution 
qui a fait du monde hellenique le monde chretien n'a 
rien de brusque, rien qui sente le miracle ou le mystere; 
que le christianisme etait deja en grande partie dans 
rhellenisme, et en est sorti naturellement. J'ajoutais 
cependant qu'il y a autre chose dans le christianisme que 
rhellenisme et d'abord le judaisme, qui en est un 
element considerable. C'est cet element que j'ai a 
reconnaitre aujourd *hui; on verra que le christianisme 
doit quelque fois plus au judaisme qu'il ne I'avoue." 

Nor perhaps are we less wonder stricken when we 
read in Sabatier (Religions of Authority); ''therefore 
we must not be surprised when very conservative 
theologians, with Mr. F. Godet at their head, resolutely 
break with the old Christology and deny the infalli- 
bility of Jesus. For his general culture he was reduced, 
like us, to the testimony of his senses and of men who 
were his contemporaries, and to national traditions 
bequeathed by their ancestors. This avowal, once 
made, opens a breach which cannot again be closed. 
What may in future pass through it criticism alone can 
tell. For Mr. Godet, for example, the opinions of 
Jesus as to the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch or the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 167 

Davidic authorship of Psalm CX are simply tradi- 
tional opinions which leave untouched the freedom of 
modern science. His son, Mr. George Godet, goes a 
step further. He judges that it is not possible to 
attribute to Jesus the views of Newton or Laplace as 
to the structure of the universe, and that he probably 
held those which we find in the first chapters of Genesis. 
Next comes M. Leopold Monod, with the question, 
whether the same reflections do not apply to demoniac 
possession and demonology. Still others arise and 
point out that Jesus had the same notions as all the 
pious Jews of his time, as to the Kingdom of God, and 
the imminent end of the world. The declaration of 
Jesus, 'Heaven and Earth shall pass away but my words 
shall not pass away,' is often cited with triumphant 
emphasis. What irony ! The context shows that these 
words refer precisely to prophecies which, if the text 
has been correctly preserved, have been negatived by 
the events. We are then forced either to doubt the 
literal form of these discourses or to apply the Saviour's 
declaration to some other subject." 

Now much of all this discussion, if it does not funda- 
mentally uproot our previous attitude toward the 
Christian revelation, leaves us as Mr. Benson describes 
the state of mind of Hugh Neville (Beside Still Waters) 
*'if he was not in a position to affirm with certitude the 
truth of the recorded events which attained the origin 
of the Christian revelation, he could yet affirm with 
confidence that in the teaching of Christ a higher range 
of emotion had been reached than had ever been 
approached before;" though if M. Havet's contentions 



168 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

are accepted even this would be in a large measure 
dissipated. 

As Dr. Briggs tells us that the only prophetic writings 
which are certainly by one author are Joel, Jonah, 
Zephariah, Haggai, Malachi, Nahun in the Old Testa- 
ment, so he informs us with the same precision that in 
the New, ''the gospel of Matthew is a compilation using 
the gospel of Mark and the Logia of Matthew as the 
chief sources. The gospel of Luke is a compilation, 
using the same gospel of Mark and the Logia of Mat- 
thew, and also other hebraic sources for its gospel of 
the infancy, and possibly also, another source for the 
Perean ministry. The book of Acts is a compilation, 
using a hebraic narrative of the early Jerusalem Church, 
and the We narrative of a co- traveler with Paul, and 
probably other sources. The gospel of John is also 
partly a compilation, using an earlier gospel of John in 
the Hebrew language, and the Hymn to the Logos in the 
Prologue;" all of which added to conjunctional and 
contributary causes for distruct does not, in all truth 
and honesty, strengthen confidence or relieve distrust. 

No one who has read Hellbeck of Bannisdale with 
an understanding mind but must have felt a natural 
sympathy with Miss Laura Fountain, and probably 
entered more deeply into an intelligent compassion for 
her scruples, if they have gone through a slow, perhaps 
intolerable, process of mental change, in which religious 
convictions crumble and dissolve; — and such an one 
realizes that nothing could restore those convictions 
but a new revelation. 

It is quite apparent that one need not go far off the 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 169 

beaten path of orthodox tradition to have his ears 
numbed with vociferations that Christ was only an 
extraordinary man, and that his supernatural advent is a 
fabric of fancy, an interesting delusion, and false. 
Such an one feels that when all is said and done, when he 
has reviewed his former attitude to the Bible in the 
light of all these new disclosures, and that, though these 
latter should have (in view of the intrinsic preeminence 
of the Bible's message and its sharp relief above the 
insane obscenities and stupid inanities which formed 
the starting points of Indian or Grecian mythology) 
no indispensable expelling or expunging power; yet, 
by a temperamental accident or tendency his faith has 
frightfully shrunk, or altered its old and honorable 
lineaments. 

Our Christian faith has its difficulties, even for the 
boundless credulity of savages, and as Dr. Moffat says 
(quoted by Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion) 
*'to speak of the Creation, the Fall, and the Resurrec- 
tion, seemed more fabulous, extravagant, and ludicrous 
to them, than their own vain stories of lions and 
hyenas," and it was a Zulu, says Lang 'Vho suggested 
to Bishop Colenso his doubts about the historical char- 
acter of the Noachian Deluge." 

Perhaps the Christian faith involves just such an 
antinomy that nothing but revelation can force reason 
to succumb to its sublime incredibleness ; therefore if 
the old revelations have lost their power, I mean in the 
dogmatic and supernatural sense, why should it be 
considered irrelevant or irreverent to ask for another? 
and that the other can be quite different from the for- 



170 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

mer two, and bring within itself the coalescence of the 
modern temper with a theological ascription, is argued 
in a succeeding chapter. 

To those who insist that the revelations we have, are 
adequate, the foregoing paragraphs of this chapter are 
meant to demonstrate the utter reasonableness of ask- 
ing for their confirmation, since they have been progres- 
sively diminished in their authority by study and 
research.* We all know how true this is, and to what 
an extent today among cultivated Christians the difficult 
statements, the ''hard" doctrine is glossed over, dis- 
carded, or forgotten. 

And doubt is more patently nourished when observa- 
tion seems to show us that neither are the premises of 
the revelation kept, nor that the present aspect of the 
world, or its tortuous and stumbling history reveals 
an indisputable divine guidance. Perhaps to ask for a 
revelation of any kind, or to seek reliance upon one, 
might place us, in the estimation of thinkers, as Prof. 
Royce, with ''such persons who think that a Spirit that 
is not constantly producing noteworthy effects, and so 
getting himself in the newspapers, would seem unreal. 
Therefore to such persons Religious Idealism depends 
for its life and warmth upon the vividness and the 

*Auguste Sabatier — a Christian scholar — says (Religions of Authority and 
the Religion of the Spirit) "textual criticism was not less fatal to the dogma 
than exegesis. Searching out and collecting the manuscripts, collating the 
writings of the Fathers and the ancient versions, scholars accumulated various 
readings on the margins of the New Testament, demonstrating that, though 
the sacred text had been most piously preserved, it had by no means escaped 
the accidents that befall human things; that differences had accumulated in 
proportion as copies had been made; that it was therefore, often necessary to 
be content with conjectures and probability; and that since the pure, original 
text could not be restored with any degree of certainty, the doctrine of verbal 
inspiration, usque ad voces et consones, no longer applied to anything, and had 
become useless." 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 171 

impressiveness of these phenomenal indications of the 
action of the great spirit." But we defy anyone to 
show outside of a revelation (assuming of course its 
existence or possible existence) where certainty or even 
certitude can be found in the schools of philosophy, 
much less expected, in the fluttering and dishevelled 
dreams of doctrinaires and lunatics. 



CHAPTER VII 
The Church 

If we turn with saddened hearts from the Revela- 
tions, we find ourselves confronting the Church, and 
are enlisted by its adherents in an inquiry how far it 
should be considered as holding the answer to the 
inveterate questions we have been asking. 

If we are free in our judgment and have discharged 
all preconceptions in the matter we might, with justifi- 
cation, ask, where, or what is the Church? Chris- 
tianity has some one hundred sorts of organizations 
which with varying emphasis and ardor claim to be the 
Church, and a flourishing group of believers have 
established a recent experiment on the deciduous 
doctrines of a Mrs. Eddy, with a strangely sleepy and 
affected book — **A Guide to the Scriptures" — as an 
inspiration, and are called the Church also. 

Are all these forms of the church to be combined and 
reintegrated and then to express to us an authoritative 
exposition of the church's voice and message? Hardly. 
Their points of contrast are indeed not so great as to 
preclude a mental conception of their unity in one or 
two primordial affirmations — as; that there is a God; 
that there is a Future life; that there has been a 
Revelation. But in so far as they have had an histori- 
cal development, and as their own existence presupposes 
revelation, or some kind of ordination, involving his- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 173 

tory, it seems, on the face of it, a reasonable prerequisite 
and proposition to find out which of all the phases of 
the Christian church and establishment came first in 
time, which first subserved the purposes of the revela- 
tion, that is supposed to have created a church; for 
the church as a purely human or social institution is 
quite impoverished of any coercive authority over us or 
any one, unless it proves its authenticity as a derivative 
process from the revelation. 

And right here we could disestablish the church and 
its claims at once, by pointing to the conclusion of the 
last chapter, that the revelation is involved in doubt, 
which carries with it an inclusive reference of doubt for 
all of its lineal results, among which is the church. Yet 
because of an aesthetic and moral sense of the enormous 
social consequences connoted by the Christian church, 
an appreciation of its extraordinary historical prestige, 
and the homage exacted by the stupendous assemblage 
of devotion, energy and ability incorporated in it, now 
and in the past, we shall not take advantage (the word is 
self -accusative alone in an inquiry meant to be unbiased, 
free and frankly inquisitive) of the logical objection 
that an institution, apparently founded on a perceived 
and written document, falls with the impeachment or 
disproof of the document. 

Let us locate and interrogate this church; for at 
least it is conceivable that in some way it may possess a 
superiority to the so-called revelation — the Bible which 
after all is, as we know it, a series of written symbols, 
conveying intelligible ideas. The church could have 
been propagated in such historical propinquity to 



174 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

supernatural events, as to carry on, by a personal 
objective ministration and a subjective spiritual re- 
flexion the idea or the message of a revelation, better 
than corrupted texts or invincibly defective chronicles. 

That seems a permissible statement, and a point of 
view intelligible and not uninteresting, for it might 
place the church in front of the merely textual revela- 
tion — the Bible. The Bible would become the literary 
representation of the revelation, its coarse and defective 
transcription in words, but the church would be, so to 
speak, its biogenetic offspring, hence its embodiment. 

Let us concede the point, and see whether we have 
reason to think that the church satisfies our require- 
ment, so far as to enable us to quiet our importunity for 
a new revelation. 

Again Where is the Church? or as we might put it 
Which is the Church? This question need no longer 
puzzle us perhaps, as we are going to submit it to an 
historical test, inasmuch as the contention, allowed 
above, rests in the historical conjunction of Church 
and Revelation. The Roman Catholic church has 
priority, has the historic mark of bodily relationship to 
the Christian revelation, and through it to the Hebrew 
revelation, which is possessed by none other. That is 
certainly clear, unspeakably clear, especially as the line 
of thought we are now following, involves what might 
be called, a somatic continuation of the Christ. It is 
also just as clear that in its historical experience the 
Roman church has developed a lot of dogma and articles 
of faith, which appeared long subsequent to its begin- 
nings, and are unmistakably additions, assumptions, 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 175 

and merely theological excrescences; though for its pur- 
poses immensely useful. 

But these corruptions, if one cares to call them such, 
in no sense abridge its possible authoritative utter- 
ance on the simple question; Is there a God? and is 
there a Future Life? Now the answer of the church — 
of the Roman Catholic Church — to these interrogations 
is clear enough, and loud enough, but is it adequate? 
To make it adequate the church must show credentials 
of authority, as a revelation does: it must show super- 
natural power. It is a shallow and unthinking com- 
mentary — often indeed united to very winning ideals 
and expressed in a seductive phraseology — that we 
need no miraculous or supernatural accompaniments to 
a revelation, and only noble thoughts, lofty ambitions, 
pure motives, and an infallible conduct. Rubbish, 
positive rubbish, it has often been beautifully expressed, 
as when Mr. Benson writes, "the teaching of the Gospel 
and the teaching of Plato were alike deeply idealistic. 
They both depended upon the simple idea that men 
could conceive of themselves as better than they actu- 
ally were, and upon the fact that such a conception is 
the strongest motive force in the world in the direction 
of self-improvement. The mystery of conversion is 
nothing more than the conscious apprehension of the 
fact that one's life is meant to be noble and beautiful, 
and that one has the power to make it nobler and more 
beautiful than it is;" all of which is deliquescent non- 
sense, and utterly at war with what any hard headed 
man of the world knows to be the truth of things. 

Place a so-called revelation on the everyday level of 



176 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

human experience and dress it in brilliant apothegms 
and angelic sentiments and it will have about as much 
force, considered as a revelation, as a new, elegant, and 
impeccable system of sanitary plumbing — and further, 
it ought to have no more. But let the promulgator of 
commonplaces or even half truths or exploded fictions 
or even reprehensible fancies, flash in the eye of gaping 
admirers an inexplicable and stupendous phenomenon, 
defying plausibility and over-riding possibility, and his 
doctrine is at once lifted, hitched up into an atmos- 
phere of transfigured and illimitable power. And 
rightly so. It requires no very minute analysis to prove 
this. 

A revelation is itself the reciprocal of our supreme 
ignorance as to the meaning of life and its consequences, 
its sources, its control. Hence when it comes, if it 
comes at all, it comes with the attributes of the realms 
outside of human experience, and assures us of its 
origin by its supercession over human power and 
human knowledge. It may have, must have, if it is a 
revelation at all, in a real sense and worthy of attention, 
moral and spiritual qualities, unless it comes from the 
devil, and supports a diabolical glory of lusts, lies, and 
deceits. 

But at any rate it must bear the traits of an invulner- 
able omnipotence, omniscience, and give testimony to 
its inscrutable, incalculable, and infallible essence. 
And it can only do so by bringing with it the phenomena 
of supernatural power. 

If we are going to trust the church — the Roman 
Catholic church — to allay our doubts, and instill 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 177 

certainty and assurance into our souls, has this 
church the marks of a supernatural dispensation, 
does it seem to perpetuate the revelation or any revela- 
tion by an authoritative exhibition of control over 
natural forces, or the unique possession of any manda- 
tory skill and supremacy over natural processes, which 
meets the requisitions of a definition of miracles given 
by us elsewhere (The World as Intention), viz. '*a 
creative act involving a supernatural process, which is a 
demonstration of law being a manifestation of the 
property of God-creativeness." Now it is certainly 
true that this same church with the veritable genius it 
exhibits for theological consistency shows its apprecia- 
tion of this logical expectation and claims, and always 
has claimed, the miraculous power, but it is far from 
clear that it either had, or today has the power in such 
measure or in any measure sufficient to make its 
claims good, or to satisfy our fastidious and exacting 
demands. The matter furnishes grounds for a peculiar 
study. 

In dealing with supernatural efficiencies, events, or 
claims, it is obvious that no exact rules can be pre- 
scribed for their occurrence, and working blindly in a 
field of hypothetical wonders we might err on the side 
of sceptical severity as easily as on that of credulous 
acquiescence; we might as quickly reject all evidence 
as accept all, and we might naturally fail to give the 
right weight to any. If supernatural transactions 
appear unevenly, now crowded together and now 
separated by long intervals it is possible to believe that 
this strange gift or power varies with conditions, 



178 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

persons, and needs, or that there were records kept at 
one time more carefully than at another, or, accepting 
the hint of a scoffing indifference, that it paid better to 
have the miracles when they did occur, than when they 
did not occur. 

Many preliminary considerations might be urged but 
in reality we are not so much in search of proof as to the 
residence of supernatural power in the church, as we 
are anxious to determine whether it resides there to 
such a degree as to make the church's utterance on the 
critical questions asked above, satisfactory and irrefrag- 
able, and whether, residing there, it makes itself dis- 
tinctly felt. In discussing the revelations, it was not 
altogether that we felt that there had been no revela- 
tion, as that wSO much of it as was historically recorded, 
was beset with uncertainty and error, and that because 
of that demonstrable fact we felt our position, as 
claimants for another revelation, reasonably supported, 
reasonably fair, perhaps indeed so much more than fair 
as to become imperative. Similarly the church may 
present evidence of supernatural power, the historic 
assertion may be impeccable, but it may be seen 
through such a cloud of qualifying considerations as to 
quite lose its essential force for us. The laws of evi- 
dence should certainly be invoked, and yet such laws as 
applied to secular happenings might miss giving us a 
right conclusion in a supernatural event, which for 
occult reasons, would be apparent to one observer, and 
quite invisible to another at the same time and the same 
place; though as a matter of fact the church miracles 
as reported seem to be of so downright a material, 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 179 

corporeal, objective forcefulness as to make such 
reservations unnecessary. 

In another way the point might be settled : is there a 
quantitative force of evidence, does it appear that the 
church from its beginnings to the present, has been 
richly filled with the power, so that its whole pathway 
is marked, and conspicuous with these monuments to 
its transcendental authority? Or have there been a 
few sublime instances — like arc lights in the gloom of 
the commonplace — so well authenticated as to be 
beyond suspicion, and so serioi^s or tremendous in their 
import as to convey to the church an unquestionable 
miraculous origin? Before clustering round our heads, 
or at our ears, more specifications or claims for sorts of 
miracles — and they might be made many — let us quote 
this remark of the Catholic writer, who perhaps more 
than any recent thinker on the subject has infused into 
the theme a somewhat philosophic thoughtfulness. 

In a note attached to his Apologia pro sua Vita 
Cardinal Newman expresses this view; "Catholics 
believe that miracles happen in any age of the church, 
though not for the same purposes, in the same number, 
or with the same evidence, as in Apostolic times. The 
Apostles wrought them in evidence of their divine 
mission; and with this object they have been some- 
times wrought by Evangelists of countries since, as even 
Protestants allow. Hence we hear of them in the his- 
tory of St. Gregory in Pontus, and St. Martin in Gaul; 
and in their case, as in that of the Apostles, they were 
both numerous and clear. As they are granted to 
Evangelists, so are they granted, though in less measure 



180 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

and evidence, to other holy men ; and as holy men are 
not found equally at all times and in all places, therefore 
miracles are in some places and times more than in 
others. And since generally, they are granted to faith 
and prayer, therefore in a country in which faith and 
prayer abound, they will be more likely to occur, than 
where and when faith and prayer are not ; so that their 
occurrence is irregular. And further, as prayer and 
faith obtain miracles, so still more commonly do they 
gain from above the ordinary interventions of Provi- 
dence; and, as it is often very difficult to distinguish 
between a providence and a miracle, and there will be 
more providences than miracles, hence it will happen 
that many occurrences will be called miraculous, which, 
strictly speaking are not such, that is, not more than 
providential mercies, or what are sometimes called 
grazie or favours." 

Now it may be known to the reader that Cardinal 
Newman, at least among Catholic writers, maintains 
that to treat the history '*of the Catholic church with- 
out taking miracles into account is to profess to write 
the annals of a reign yet to be silent about the monarch 
— to overlook his personal character and professed 
principles, his indirect influence and immediate acts," 
that "miracles are the kind of facts proper to ecclesiasti- 
cal history, just as instances of sagacity or daring, per- 
sonal prowess or crime are the facts proper to secular 
history." 

It is further a kind of theological or ecclesiastical, 
principle with Newman, that ''since what happened 
once might happen again, a certain probability, at 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 181 

least no kind of improbability was attached to the idea 
taken in itself, of miraculous intervention in later 
times, and miraculous accounts were to be regarded in 
connexion with the verisimilitude, scope, instrument, 
character, testimony and circumstances, with which 
they presented themselves to us: and, according to the 
final results of those various considerations, it was our 
duty to be sure, or to believe, or to opine, or to surmise, 
or to tolerate, or to reject, or to denounce." 

It may be further known to the reader that Mr. 
Edwin Abbott has written a book entitled Philomythus 
— an antidote against credulity — in which with extreme 
industry, a very exacting analysis, and in a spirit 
apparently saturated with an unquestioning allegiance 
and love for the gospels, he has sharply confronted 
Cardinal Newman, and attacked his doctrine, "prob- 
ability as the guide of life," with unswerving zeal. 

The point we have reached, and the outlook offered 
by it, might not exactly interest either of these com- 
batants — not Mr. Abbott certainly, for his faith springs 
to its object with the instinctive certitude of simply 
strong feeling ''in the spiritual, the naturally spiritual 
experience of Christian souls and Christian societies" — 
though it might develop liens of attachment to his own 
position, for the great cardinal. 

Mr. Abbott rejects the ecclesiastical miracles as un- 
necessary to faith. Cardinal Newman urges the proof 
of a number, and constructs a platform of attestation 
for the divine source of the church, by reason of their 
proven quality and occurrence. We sympathize with 
the Cardinal's design, though we can understand and 



182 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

appreciate its critical demolition by Mr. Abbott. They 
both furnish us with material for our discussion, for of 
course, apart from the polemics of these antagonists, 
the fact, if it can be proven of miracles at all in the 
historic church, is a matter rather stringently related to 
life and faith, and especially so to us when, as leaving 
revelation, unconvinced, or, more truthfully, not funda- 
mentally satisfied, we are scanning the horizon for new 
succour. 

There is no dearth of recorded miracles in the annals 
of the church, and there are many phenomena of a 
similar character, or which might be placed in the same 
category, in the denominations, the churches outside of 
the Catholic communion. In turning over the pages of 
Brewer's Dictionary of Miracles, it is quite astounding 
to note the number and variety of these interesting 
stories, and it is just as plain as anything that the most 
of them are fictitious or exaggerated reports in which a 
certain fabulous beauty and romantic invention, like 
that of a fairy tale, prevail, and prevail with a dis- 
tinctly discrediting effect. 

Many of them are very pretty, some of them un- 
pleasant, many of them preposterous, and almost all 
conceived in a vein of enduring and delighted wonder. 
It has often, I believe, been pointed out that the 
miracles of the ages succeeding the establishment of 
Christianity, as recorded in the New Testament, are of 
an incomparably poorer type, and deficient in that 
simple and comporting dignity of relation and meaning, 
which pertains to the miracles of the Gospels, though 
perhaps even here there is a slight fallacy of sentiment, 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 183 

the inevitable injection of that bias of veneration which 
so creditably surrounds the valued treasury of our old 
religious faiths. 

Now Dr. Brewer has given a kind of systematization 
to his collection of miracles by separating it into groups, 
each one of which presents a scriptural type, that is a 
miracle, or a text, or a dogma, from the Bible, forms a 
pattern for the secular miracles of the historic period. 
Thus Brewer explains his sections; in the first ''some 
miracle of the Bible is taken as a text, and then 
from the various hagiographies are quoted corres- 
ponding examples; thus as Elisha's axe was made to 
float on water, so St. Benedict makes an axe-head, 
which has fallen into a lake rise to the surface and be- 
come firmly fixed into its haft again;" in the second 
section "Scripture texts are shown expanded into illus- 
trative incidents as when we read, 'thou wilt not suffer 
thy holy one to see corruption,' the accommodating 
annalist tells his readers of the bodies of saints which 
do not decay;" the third section exemplifies the Roman 
Catholic dogmas; thus the value of Holy Water is 
shown by the success attending St. Achard's use of it, 
who "used to go over his abbey every night, when the 
inmates had retired to their cells, and visit the dormi- 
tories with cross and holy water to drive away evil 
spirits, which often hid themselves in these places to 
scare the sleepers in their sleep." 

The perusal of a very few of these show their 
legendary and insubstantial character. They are re- 
scripts of country tales, or the barefaced mongered 
inventions of ecclesiastical peddlers. They cannot 



184 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

be true, though no opportunity is prepared in Brewer 
for their evidential support or examination. As Dr. 
Brewer says, ''the language of the church added no 
little to the same husbandry. Every sin, every heresy, 
every doubt was believed to be the work of some demon. 
Sickness was produced by the indwelling of the same 
malignant spirits; so were storms and tempests, floods 
and fires, earthquakes and gales. Hence to cure a sick- 
ness was, in many cases, synonymous with casting out a 
devil ; to break down a heathen altar was to dislodge a 
demon; to drain a flood was to overcome the evil one; 
and to combat a storm was to wage war with Satan.'* 
A church with such an arsenal of trophies from the 
realms of the Supernatural can scarcely be regarded 
with much interest in these illuminated and fair days. 
The authorities for these amazing tales are, the Acta 
Sanctorum, Les Petits Gollandistes , a vast compilation of 
Mgr. Guerin, and the Lives of the Saints, by Edward 
Kinesman; and the illimitable maze of wonders has 
been indubitably treated with absolute impartiality, no 
sanction being asked for anything except its former 
currency. 

The miracles thus collected, are most numerous, and 
especially crowd the centuries in which superstition 
flourished, and when science, culture, and knowledge 
maintained a feeble life, at a time when faith was as 
natural as breathing, and credulity in the masses was 
only less healthy and aspiring than the love of food and 
gaming. Here are a few samples of the least edifying 
and most strange, and purely stupid miracles; ''St. 
Aphrodisius, bishop of Beziers, met with great success 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 185 

in his preaching, and converted many from idolatry to 
the Christian faith: but one day a number of pagans 
set upon him, and after tossing him about from one to 
another, finished their sport by cutting off his head. 
St. Aphrodisius raising himself up, took his head 
between his hands, and walking through the midst of 
the crowd carried it to a certain chapel beyond the 
town, and buried it there." Again ''Gelges was the 
daughter of Aedfind, a king of Ireland, then divided 
into six kingdoms: and married clandestinely prince 
Fintan, son of Finloga, king of Momonia, one of the six 
kingdoms. From this union sprang Fursy, afterwards 
canonized. Aedfind, perceiving that his daughter was 
about to give birth to a child, and learning by inquiry 
that its father was a Christian, was so enraged, that he 
ordered Gelges at once to be burnt to death, and went 
himself to see the sentence carried out. As Gelges was 
led away to execution, the child in the womb reproved 
its cruel grandfather with a loud voice and intelligible 
words"; and lastly, and by way of a climax, short and 
overwhelming, "on one occasion, we are told, the 
Venerable Bede preached to a heap of stones, thinking 
himself in a church; and the stones were so affected 
by his eloquence that they exclaimed, 'Amen Venerable 
Bede' " which last, with its fairy glamour, is not dis- 
pleasing, but insufferable rubbish for serious considera- 
tion. 

Cardinal Newman has been at some pains to go 
over, apparently with an affectionate interest, a large 
supply of the Christian miracles, and has selected from 
the difficult mass those which in his opinion are so well 



186 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

accredited as to deserve the acceptance of Christians. 
He admits that the scriptural miracles are very different 
from the ecclesiastical miracles, and Mr. Abbott is not 
slow to indicate that the Cardinal arguing from the fact 
that God performed the former, to the probability that 
God will perform the latter, does in effect argue thus, 
"that because God once did something for a special 
purpose, therefore it is quite likely that He will here- 
after do something quite different, and for no purpose, 
or at all events for no discernible purpose" ; a statement 
which would certainly do injustice to our point of view, 
as the fact of miracles, of any sort if abundantly proven, 
and absolutely incontrovertible, would help a little, at 
least in determining for us how far we felt prescribed to 
accept the church's answer to the questions we have 
been asking. 

It is indeed unnecessary to dwell upon Mr. Abbott's 
parti pris as objecting to these ecclesiastical miracles, 
upon grounds of exceptions to Newman's arguments 
for their partial acceptance, for a general toleration of 
them, and his plea for a certain sort of friendly recep- 
tivity for them. An argumentative view of the ques- 
tion is quite outside of the purpose of this book. We 
are looking for the credentials of the church, and at this 
moment, supposing the church supercedes revelation, 
are, as it were, listening for its certain accents upon the 
questions we wish answered. Therefore as we know 
its opinion or, more affirmatively, its assertions, we are 
again diligently in quest for the proofs of its divine 
powers. Do these miracles furnish them? Very im- 
perfectly we think; so imperfectly that they could not 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 187 

be considered as operative tests for the church's 
divinely assigned mission to promulgate any views, or 
answer any questions with certainty. 

Now Cardinal Newman has chosen out of the thou- 
sands of miracles which he has looked into, a crucial or 
solvent few, which have both a subjective and objective 
character, that is they represent interpositions in favor 
of the church from outside, and they also illustrate the 
sovereignty over nature of its saints within it. It 
may be as well to attend to these. A very special and 
well known one is the miracle of the Thundering Legion, 
by which it happened that a Roman army under the 
emperor Marcus Aurelius was face to face with the 
enemy, and about to perish with thirst, when one of 
the soldiers — a Christian — prayed for water and rain 
fell accompanied by such thunder and lightning as to 
terrify and rout the enemy. The emperor admitted 
the efficacy of the petition, and the legion was ever 
afterwards called the Thundering Legion. Upon this 
Newman remarks in his Essay on Ecclesiastical 
Miracles : "under these circumstances I do not see what 
remains to be proved. Here is an army in extreme 
jeopardy, with Christians in it; the enemy is destroyed, 
and they are delivered. And Apollinaris, Tertullian, 
and Eusebius, attest that these Christians in the army 
prayed, and that the deliverance was felt at the time 
to be an answer to their prayers ; what remains but to 
accept their statement ? " 

But other writers, in the very next breath are upon 
us with denials and disproof and scorn. We are told 
that Eusebius simply "reports" this event, that the 



188 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

pagan writers ascribe to it a different interpretation, 
and one which a modern would naturally ascribe also, 
that Tertullian speaking of the letter of the "wise and 
judicious emperor Marcus Aurelius," according to 
Bishop Lightfoot, "had no direct and personal know- 
ledge of any such letter," and that, though "heathen 
historians, medals still extant, and the column which 
bears the name of Antoninus at Rome, concur with 
Christian tradition in commemorating the extra- 
ordinary deliverance of the Roman army, during the 
war with the German nations, from a situation of the 
Utmost peril and difficulty" (Milman), that no other 
Father mentions this miracle, and that Newman him- 
self concludes that the thunderstorm occurred, hut 
"whether through miracle or not we cannot say for 
certain but more probably not through miracle, in the 
philosophical sense of the word." Considering that we 
already postulate doubt as to the church's knowledge, 
such a miracle as this would scarcely dispel it. 

Then there is the famous incident of the appearance 
of a cross to Constantine, viz. that Constantine on his 
march, saw together with his whole army, a luminous 
Cross in the sky above the mid-day sun, with the 
inscription. In this conquer: and that in the ensuing 
night, he had a dream in which "our Lord appeared 
with the Cross, and directed him to frame a standard 
like it as a means of victory in his contest with Maxen- 
tius," But here again we are not allowed any implicit 
confidence. Eusebius mentions the miracle doubtfully 
and Milman assures us that "the silence, not only of all 
contemporary history (the legend of Artemius, 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 189 

abandoned even by Tillemont, does not deserve the 
name), but of Eusebius himself, in his Ecclesiastical 
History, gives a most dangerous advantage to those 
who altogether reject the story," and he adds ''the 
great difficulty which encumbers the theory which 
resolves it into a solar halo, or some natural 
phenomenon is the legend, en touto mka, which no 
optical illusion can well explain, if it be taken literally. 
The only rational theory is to suppose that this was the 
inference drawn by the mind of Constantine, and 
embodied in these words ; which being inscribed on the 
labarutriy or on the arms of any other public monument, 
as commemorative of the event, gradually grew into 
an inseparable part of the original vision." 

The third of Dr. Newman's miracles which has 
received an especial stamp of verisimilitude is the Fiery 
Eruption on Julian's attempt to rebuild the Temple, 
when "the work was abandoned; and the Christians of 
later ages could appeal to the remains of the shattered 
works and unfinished excavations, as the unanswerable 
sign of the Divine wrath against their adversaries, as the 
public and miraculous declaration of God in favour of 
their insulted religion." (Milman.) ''The main fact" 
says Milman "is indisputable, that, as they dug down 
to the foundations, terrific explosions took place; what 
seemed balls of fire burst forth; the works were 
shattered to pieces ; clouds of smoke and dust enveloped 
the whole in darkness, broken only by the wild and fitful 
glare of the flames. Again the work was renewed by 
the obstinate zeal of the Jews; and again they were 
repelled by this unseen and irresistible power, till they 



190 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

cast away their implements and abandoned the work 
in humiliation and despair." 

One trouble about this event interpreted as a miracle 
is that it is overdone in the records, although it seems to 
be admitted that there is considerable testimony to its 
actual occurrence in some form. It is one of those 
miracles of terror (if miracle at all) when, as Milman 
observes, "the passion of fear so completely unhinges 
and disorders the mind, as to deprive it of all trust- 
worthy power of observation or discrimination." We 
are told that "all the tools of the workmen were melted 
down; there was an earthquake; the new excavation 
was filled up; the old buildings in the neighborhood 
were thrown down ; numbers of Jews were buried in the 
ruins; the fire met those who fled to a church, at the 
door, and forced them back with the loss either of life 
or their extremities; the fiery mass, says another, ranged 
up and down the street for hours." Guizot has not 
been unwilling to ascribe the overthrow of Julian's 
efforts to the explosions of the firedamps, the occluded 
gases in the immense excavations in the mountain, and 
the genius of Gibbon glosses over the fact with this 
calm irony; "a philosopher may still require the 
original evidence of impartial and intelligent spectators. 
At this important crisis, any singular accident of nature 
would assume the appearance and produce the effects 
of a real prodigy. This glorious deliverance would be 
speedily improved and magnified by the pious art of the 
clergy of Jerusalem, and the active credulity of the 
Christian world ; and at the distance of twenty years, a 
Roman historian careless of theological disputes, might 
adorn his work with the specious and splendid miracle." 



THE WORLD^S PRAYER 191 

Besides the miracles mentioned, and which might be 
called objective there are in Newman's catalogue of 
particular miracles the following subjective ones, or 
those which originated in the supernatural powers or 
privileges of individuals in the church; viz. the Change 
of water into oil by St. Narcissus; the Change of the 
course of the River Lycus by St. Gregory; the Death 
of Arius; the Recovery of the blind man at Milan; 
the Power of speech continued to the African Confessors 
when deprived of their tongues; the Miraculous effects 
of the Oil of St. Walburga. In every case the force of 
the event qua miracle is qualified by objections, by 
suspicion, and by reasonable doubt. Newman 
abandons the first, the second seems to be deficient in 
proof, the third also, the fourth a possible faith cure, 
and at any rate lacking completeness i. e. the blind man 
was not very much helped, the fifth equivocal as cases 
of tongueless persons speaking are on record, the sixth 
apparently weakened by unmethodical and dilapidated 
evidence (Vide Kingsley), though, judging from the 
letter of the Rev. Corbinian Wandinger (Appendix to 
Apologia pro Vita Sua) there is noticeable testimony of 
some kind of mysteriousness in the properties as in the 
development of this oil. The oil might have been 
mineral and utterly unrelated to the bones of the saint 
as a source of supply. 

Now there is not here in these miracles and in the vast 
numbers which Brewer's and others' industry have 
gathered together, the sort of authoritative evidence as 
to the unimpeachable value of the other opinions of the 
church, or let us say its dogmas, its creed, and even the 



192 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

broadest outlines of its faith, which means the existence 
of God and the certainty of a Future Life. They and 
other considerations stand for something, we admit it, 
to ourselves, but there is still left highly insistent and 
active the impetuous wish to know more, and it is a 
wish which is not unsustained and unwarranted; 
thousands share it, and the church itself should not 
shrink from allying itself to the effort to constrain God 
to a clearer and modern utterance. 

If we turn from these ancient days over which as over 
the years of the Revelation hangs a peculiar veil of 
unreality, at least to us in this modern moment, with 
its hilarious eagerness and its dazzling light of science, 
and look for the same signs of her consecration and 
power in the church of Rome we find none impressive or 
sublime. Relics are said to be effecting cures, appari- 
tions happen here and there, but it is all tedious and 
doubtful, and we ask again for some sudden glow, some 
torrent of illumination that will dispel our torpor and 
repugnance. 

The church is useful, most useful, but is it anything 
else? Is it divine, does its hand rest in God's, are its 
lips speaking as His oracles, can it defy the process of 
nature, does a light of other worlds shine on its altars, 
and do its strange and isolated priests vouchsafe — with 
power to deny — the mystery of eternal life? We 
Protestants look at it with a trembling wonder. It is 
so old and hoary, it has been so wicked, its culture is 
so unimaginable and exclusive, so portentous and so 
mechanical, so zealous and so designing, its roots spring 
from such a marvellous soil, its fruitage is so various 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 193 

and fantastic, and it butts with such invincible and 
dull obstinacy against the truth of facts and reasons. 
Today it seems a little pinched and wrinkled, and its 
voice has a cracked and uneasy complaining note in it, 
and we hardly think of it anymore as holding the gift of 
prophecy and of tongues ; and yet it gleams with a kind 
of spent fascination. It seems very much at war with 
our day — and why? Is our day so bad, that it should 
denounce or quarrel with it? Is it not the best of days 
that ever were? We have lost faith but why? Know- 
ledge has shaken, as with the hand of a giant old 
fabrics and structures, and the City of God on earth is 
falling about our ears, and because of that we ask for 
the descent, in some new form, of that same City; or 
else indeed in the old form, transfigured, from the skies. 

It is not that the revelation does not count, or that 
the church does not count, but both need replacement 
or reassertion in modern terms, somehow, as to these 
two things God and Another Life. We are bewildered 
— the natural world and every-day life adds each day, 
and month, and year, a tempest of miseries, and won- 
ders, and abominations, which nothing fully or partially 
explains. The very atmosphere, the air we breathe, of 
modern thought and living, engenders aversion to 
church and revelation. Can we help it? If we are 
striving hard to drink the spiritual draught offered by 
the church, if we struggle to decipher the lineaments of 
divinity in revelation, and Science and wisdom pluck 
the cup from our lips, or with new pictures turn away 
our gaze, are we to blame? 

Anon something called Pragmatism arises with 



194 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

rustling robes and swimming utterances, and in her own 
dissolute way, with spendthrift ease bids us watch our 
fancied needs, and believe our fancies. Is this right? 
Let God speak, let a new light shine from the globed 
heavens, and again let the Son of God step upon the 
earth, and again hold the rebuked world stunned and 
quiet and believing. We do not ask for the completion 
of knowledge, nor that all or even much be explained. 
Those two things only; God and Immortality. We 
are willing to pray for this new answer. We have given 
the plan. Will it work, or shall there still continue to 
be silence — and must we in that silence — albeit the 
church keeps up her prayers and her preaching, and the 
page of revelation is printed and printed and printed 
again for the many millionth time — live and move and 
have our being? And again as regards the Church and 
the Bible we are constrained to quote from the pious 
and learned Auguste Sabatier; "it needed only to nar- 
rate the long and tempestuous elaboration of the 
Catholic and Protestant dogmas of authority to show 
them both crumbling away under the triple protest of 
History, the reason, and the Christian consciousness. 
The first rests on a political, the second on a literary 
fiction. Both are the fruit of an exaggerated and mis- 
understood craving for authority, and a formal and 
abstract logic, deducing from an a priori postulate, not 
that which is, but that which ought to be. A diplo- 
matic and utilitarian argument is at the basis of all 
these systems of authority. The tribunal is declared 
infallible, not because it actually is such, but because 
there is need that it should be such." 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 195 

And as to the Church, whose credentials for our 
assurance that it is a commissioned guide in these 
questions we have been examining, the same thoughtful 
writer observes; "is it possible for a critical mind to 
lend greater faith to the more recent mythology with 
which the papacy has veiled its origin? Have its insti- 
tution by Christ and the chain of apostolical succession 
more reality than the genealogy by which the blood of 
Aeneas was traced in the family of the Caesars? Such 
poetic garlands hung on the front of the engine which 
moves the train adorn it to the eyes and imagination, 
but they do not make the steam Avhich from within sets 
it in motion, nor are they supposed to do so. A few 
more revolutions of the wheel towards the unknown 
future, and the face of the world will be renewed. The 
Catholic form of the Church had its history, its great- 
ness, its efficacy, in the past. Other forms are being 
secretly prepared which will unfold in their turn, to 
respond to new needs, and render to future ages services 
no less necessary." 

And will not the church and all Christians in their 
several ways help us? They know the practice of 
prayer, if there are means of intercession they know 
them, they have the graces of interposition, of supplica- 
tion, they surely are well regarded in the courts of the 
Most High and the emotional volume of desire should 
rise with huge compulsion from their lips and break into 
resonant waves of entreaty in the Palace of the King. 
They have guarded the ark of the covenant, they 
minister at its portals with acceptance, their lamps are 
lit, and they have kept the shew-bread untainted, and 

P 



196 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

their priests have eaten it in the sanctuary, according 
to the law; let them enlist and help us, indeed without 
them we can do nothing. Are they not willing, are 
they afraid? They should be willing for a new word 
from God means their own permanent triumph, and a 
sudden reinforcement of religion throughout the world, 
the confusion of atheism, and the rout of irreverence, 
parley and delay. 

Are they afraid? It is not, by them, feared, to ask 
for health, and sustenance, and happiness, and improve- 
ment, and forgiveness, and they do not hesitate to pray 
for unbelievers and the faithless, and ''those who 
despitefully use us"; shall it be harmful to pray for 
more light and with it the conviction of those who are 
now unconvinced? Would they not welcome this new 
light themselves? Is it construed by them as intrusion 
and an impertinence to anticipate the intentions of 
God in this manner, as it were, forcing his hand? 
There are some considerations which should dissipate 
this alarm, should make it impossible. And they arise 
from the nature of a revelation per se. 

A revelation is conditioned, we think, by the need and 
desire of men (see Prolegomena; The World as Inten- 
tion), there may be monitions of wisdom in the divine 
mind which establish it, but it comes from immanent 
desires and needs for it among men. What else? A 
revelation as we would conceive it, is not a plaything of 
God, an indulgence for the divine wit or intellect, but a 
response initiated in the precarious attitude of men 
towards some great reality, which reality with Christians 
is called Salvation. Now what we are asking for is not 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 197 

a complete revelation so far as we might assume the 
last would be, and which elsewhere (The World as 
Intention) we ventured to regard as "an actual rescue 
to perishing nations disappearing in the wreck of physi- 
cal ruin," but it is a help, which from innumerable 
points of view seems, if religion is worth considering at 
all, one of the most desirable and needful things we can 
conceive of. 

We will drop the word revelation and call what we 
are after information though it would bear the char- 
acter of a minor or incidental revelation; it would 
have respect for the need and the desire of men. Well 
this places it on a simple ground, it coordinates it with 
the daily things we all ask for, making it a little grander 
and more important. But intensely expectant as we 
are that this request should be answered, we would not 
be willing to be patient with silence, as we are, when, 
asking for health or happiness, we reconcile ourselves 
to ill health and sorrow. It passes beyond the implica- 
tions of the individual, it seriously concerns the future 
of civilization, the methods of society in national life, 
the rules of conduct perhaps, the relations of the 
superior nations to the inferior, the organization of 
society, and many other matters. (See Chapter IX, 
The Alternative.) 

And if there is no answer to our Plan inaugurated on 
a world wide scale, then, we should feel ourselves 
driven rather irresistibly to the conclusion, that there 
is no God, and no Future Life, and this is a very dreadful 
conclusion indeed, one we shudder to think of, one 
which accepted would instantly change the moral, 



198 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

intellectual and emotional face of the earth. Here is 
room for thought. 

There is a supplementary note of explanation to be 
added to this chapter. It refers to our attitude of 
attention in the Chapter on the Plan to the recorded 
work of martyrs and saints, as prescribing somewhat 
the line of action we should advise in this Great Prayer, 
this Sublime Invocation, which would seem to presup- 
pose our belief in these records, which belief would 
contrast with our unbelief in similar things in this 
chapter. 

The explanation and reconcilement is not difficult 
and saves consistency. In the Plan we had reference 
to the only discoverable means of carrying on our 
experiment, in this chapter we discuss the insufficiency 
of both revelation and the miracles of the church, to 
give us the impregnable evidence of those things we 
are anxious to determine. In the Plan we act on the 
Christian basis of ''ask and ye shall receive; knock 
and it will be opened." In the Plan we were relatively 
anxious about means and ways, and saw but one 
method, a method conceived, as the contention 
underlying this whole book is conceived, on the 
Christian basis, for prosecuting the Plan, a method of 
prayer. In this chapter where we have for an instant 
turned to the miracles of the church for her credentials, 
and which have not been convincing — to the extent of 
overcoming our doubts — we were occupied in simply 
establishing the reasonableness of our grounds for 
asking for a new communication from God. 

This dual position might seem equivocal, because we 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 199 

are, we confess placed in a difficult relation, as looking 
askance in one place upon the assertions of Christianity 
with reference to the questions we ask, and yet invocat- 
ing in another place Christianity's help in making a 
hypothetical appeal to get a new answer to the same 
questions. 

But the ambiguity is not fatal. Speaking for an 
enormous number of thinkers, and living men and 
women today, thousands of them nominally contained 
in the Christian churches, who would welcome a clearer 
light, speaking indeed for all Christians, none of whom 
could disparage or discourage an honest search for more 
knowledge we turn to Christianity — whose assertion 
that there is a God and A Future Life is the sole source 
for the belief at all in a historical sense — and we ask 
Christianity, availing itself of its experience and in- 
fluence, its ingrained habits of devotion, to ask God, for 
us, for the whole world, for themselves, to speak again. 

Is this wrong or censurable? The foregoing pages 
contain the brief of our plea for consideration. Surely 
there is nothing to fear, there is everything to hope. 
The failure of the Plan might not affect the Christian 
believer an iota, or stir him from his belief by a hair's- 
breadth, though it might urge the thousands who, by 
such a Plan, concede the Christian's standpoint as 
possible, and ask him to prove it (not in a spirit of dis- 
putation, or distrust, or cynicism, or scorn, or super- 
iority, or faithlessness, but with affection, and sym- 
pathy and reverence) — it might urge them to relegislate 
the government, and reconstruct the conduct of the 
world. For while a silent God is not the same thing as 



200 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

no God, his silence would seem to isolate us, and permit 
us, in a spirit of wholesale scientific regeneration and 
reform, to alter the economies of this earth. 

Note — Itisaltogether likely thattheFunksandHyslopsandDuffsand Aliens 
would say to this extreme urgency of ours, "Spiritualism answers one of your 
questions: there is another life." Great God! is this stifling turpitude to be 
the answer, are these bewitched fools to serve us "from on High," must we be 
thrust into the company of ghosts and non-entities, stammering night mares 
and the foul smelling and stained reincarnations of stool pigeons and vulgar 
horse play? Are these gasping and gibbering money makers, with their rig- 
ma-roles, their farce, and their catch penny shades, candles, and cabinets to 
replace the voice of Him who "created the heavens and the earth"? "Surely 
we would speak with the Almighty, and we desire to reason with God." 
What shameless insolence to ask us to look for divine knowledge in the clap- 
trap shops and amid the slime and junk of diseased minds, anaemic men, fat 
harpagons, and screaming witches! This whole spiritualistic business is 
stained with lies and, even if inexplicable, is about as interesting or ennobling 
and horrible, or it is a deceit. (See Hereward Carrington. The Physical 
Phenomena of Spiritualism.) 



CHAPTER VIII 
The Answer 

It is hard to frame a conception, endurable and 
sensible, of the method of revelation. In trying to do 
so we seem suddenly to be flung against a wall of obdu- 
rate doubts. As long as we maintain a material concep- 
tion of the world, as long as the universe remains sub- 
stantial; where ''every globe has been weighed and 
poised, every orbit has been measured and bent to its 
beautiful form, where all is changing, but the laws 
fixed by the wisdom of God, though they permit the 
rocking to and fro of the system, never introduce dis- 
order, or lead to destruction, where all is perfect and 
harmonious, and the music of the spheres that burn 
and roll around our sun is echoed by that of ten millions 
of moving worlds, that sing and shine around the 
bright suns that reign above" (Mitchell), and where all 
this is conceived in terms of matter and force, how pre- 
cisely does God live in it or speak to it, how can we 
objectify God to an infinite universe, or localize Him at 
any point in it, or out of it? 

Is He a web disseminated through it, an energumen at 
its centre, or an enclosing veil within which it is estab- 
lished? These terms are fraught with absurdity, for in 
no sense can God be thought of as a web, or a demon or 
a veil. He can be thought of as a spirit, and yet a 
spirit instantaneously present at all parts of an infinite 



202 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

universe bewilders one with its preposterous incompre- 
hensibility, and begets, so long as we retain a physical 
conception of the universe, a host of logical difficulties: 
for if God as a spirit is at every point of the universe, 
he is there as a person, and hence he becomes to us the 
utterly insupportable idea of an infinitude of individuals 
or if he is one person he must be undergoing an incessant 
and an incredible transition from point to point within 
it to be intelligently cognizant of it throughout, or if 
he is located where is the location, and how if the world 
is material, does he sensibly entertain its furthest and 
innermost limits, and its changing detail at every part, 
except as an inscrutable polyphase receiver recording an 
infinite number and kind of vibrations? 

Granting the universe is not infinite, and there have 
been adduced reasons for believing in a time edge to the 
planetary swarm, then if God is outside of it, watching 
it, contemplating it, and — if the Christian hypothesis 
stands — directing it, is he on one side of it more than 
another, or does he become a circumferential sphere of 
something wrapped round the universe, and, by some 
kind of tentacular apposition feeling it at every part? 

One's mind swims at these thoughts, one's spirit is 
revolted at these phrases, we become quickly involved 
in impertinences and delusions and, rebuffed by a maze 
of circumlocution, refuse to think at all. But if we turn 
to some form of idealism, interpret the universe in 
terms of mind, reduce matter itself to a phase of mind, 
transform a spatial infinitude to an infinite thought, 
and insert in the microcosm of an idea a world of form 
and action, groping through schemes of mental projec- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 203 

tion and schemes of mental ordination, wherein the 
Universe is God's thinking and His thought, we reach 
residual data that seem to make a revelation credible 
and possible, for God — in a way — becomes conceivable. 

Whatever matter is — and personally we do not con- 
cede its stubborn objectivity can be annihilated — yet 
on some basis of thought we can get a supportable 
theory of God's cognition of us, interest in us. His 
creative relation to the universe, and an understandable 
interaction between him and ourselves, whereby revela- 
tion becomes possible. Such a revelation might come 
to us strictly couched or conducted on mental lines, or 
it might, as revelations in the past, assume objective 
reality and bring to our senses a retinue of marvellous 
and revealing phenomena. 

Our curiosity dwells with child-like interest on the 
possibilities of such manifestations, and we refuse to 
restrain the picture-making zeal of our imagination. 

Our plan has been inaugurated, the world has con- 
sented to the vast experiment, the year of preparation, 
the year of supplication passes, and the mere formal 
observation has been completed. Enthusiasm and 
devotion, have distinguished the continuous service, 
and a psychic contagion has infected great multitudes 
with a common fervor, while from all the armories of 
faith the weapons of attack upon the threshold and 
power of Heaven, have been concentrated in a stupen- 
dous exercise of spiritual coercion. The world awaits 
an answer. 

An answer comes. It might come in many ways. 
As a celestial glory — a light at night covering the skies 



204 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

and blotting out all the stars, burning ceaselessly for 
days — one broad lambent cap of fire. This would 
possess invaluable features of strange beauty, and would 
become a spectacle as big as the earth itself. A revela- 
tion must be fashioned to meet mental receptivities, 
and grades of revelation can be sorted out, as their 
mechanism is calculated to raise wonder or sensuous 
delight, instill fear, or awaken loyalty and love, or 
satisfy reason. This nocturnal splendor w^ould surely 
be classed as a wonder. Its aesthetic features would be 
radiantly grand; for it might wax and wane and 
develop into prodigious auroral magnificences, like 
those that travelers tell of, when quivering rays of pure 
white run across the sky, when long golden draperies 
float above the head of the spectator, and take a thou- 
sand folds and undulations as if agitated by the wind, 
when the sky looks like a cupola of fire: the blue, the 
green, the yellow, the red and the white vibrating in 
the palpitating rays of the aurora, and all this, in its 
known terrestial magnitude, greatly enlarged with 
insufferable splendor, as if God, for his advertisement, 
seized the powers of the earth and multiplied them. 

Or it might be some magnified movement in the 
skies like that described by Dall in Alaska in 1867, when 
''the light approached with the wind at about half the 
pace of the wind in a cloud-like shape or condition, not 
far from the surface of the earth ; and the form of this 
luminous cloud was in successive waves or ripples and 
resembled the rings of smoke rising from a pipe, one 
within another, gradually expanding; with the inner 
rings more intense than the outer ones, and the light 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 205 

more intense in some parts of the rings than in others; 
and advancing as the ripples do when a stone is thrown 
into still water, with the ripples compressed in an oval 
form." 

Imagine the vault above us suddenly pulsating with 
these fleeing and approaching fabrics of light, so that 
the night became as day, and a palette of colors, spectral 
but intense, filmed the blazing firmament. Such a 
portent would also be congruous as expanding a natural 
phenomenon, and along the border line of legitimate 
occurrences and miraculous interventions remain in- 
structively problematic. 

The answer might be — as we are here lingering in the 
realm of physical announcements — a sudden inrush of 
comets, threading in sublime length the ebon skies, 
paling the planets, and inwoven with the constellations 
like lustrous belts of gold; 

They stood as signals to the land 
Each one a lovely light. 

Or it might be aerial concourses of music, thickly im- 
prisoned in the air, so that the earth might take in 
''strains that might create a soul under the ribs of 
death"; it might be clothed in terrible signs that re- 
voked the law of nature, the darkened day, the eclipsed 
sun, the trembling earth and all such possible signs of 
Supernature challenging attention by their untoward 
contradiction of formal sequence in the order of nature. 
In these manifestations the lowest appeal to sense is 
made, though made with a grandiose and scenic strange- 
ness that could only be regarded with impartial aston- 
ishment. And such an answer has complete justifica- 



206 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

tion in our quick poetic and dramatic response to won- 
ders and improvised beauty. These anticipations may 
be read with amusement and the smile of conscious 
superiority, but it requires no vacillating opinion for 
most of us to know how searching and stupendous this 
bare material marvellousness would prove in its effect 
on our minds and emotions, and how the most hardened 
intellectualism would throw down its syllogisms and 
pull off its mantle of scorn before these mysteries of 
some sort of instantaneous creation. 

Or let the answer be a message of mercy; the sick 
might suddenly repell attendance and arise from their 
beds restored, missioners of seraphic power might walk 
in the midst of the suffering spots of the earth, and 
bring balm and contentment, healings and changed 
hearts, renewed loves might follow their ministrations, 
and broken fellowships be reunited, and the shattered 
harmonies of life be gathered together again in song ; as 

"Silent rushes the swift Lord 
Through ruined systems still restored, 
Broad sowing bleak and void to bless, 
Plants with worlds its wilderness: 
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow 
Apples of Eden ripe tomorrow. 
House and tenant go to ground 
Lost in God, in Godhead found." 

The answer might come in many mystical and 
strangely convincing ways entering the hearts of men, 
and through some hidden and exquisite influence, as by 
an applied learning or insight or temperament winning 
conviction. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 207 

We are accustomed to associate with the idea of 
a revelation or any communication from the sources 
of spiritual grace, moral sentiments and religious 
enjoinders, framed in aphoristic and encouraging 
language, and we also naturally give to their physical 
accompaniments the expression of supernatural acts. 
For instance we do not willingly think of a revelation as 
a scientific enlightenment, as endued with the know- 
ledge of physics, or chemistry or geology, or medicine. 

But would it not be a wonderfully pleasing thing to 
have happen as an answer to our Great Prayer, that 
there arose a group or groups of minds who by the 
inspiration of genius conducted experiments, proposed 
and proved theories with regard to the character of 
matter, of mind, of our origins, and swiftly swung our 
attention from one achievement to another in all the 
wide round of science with such skill, eloquence, daring 
and certainty, that they might appear as God-sent 
messengers; that somehow there arose with these 
scientific seers, philosophers of affirmation and wisdom, 
who would, under the guise of inspired utterances or 
prophecies, assert God and the Future Life with confi- 
dence, and print before our eyes the future of this world, 
which in years would be realized, carrying thus a wit- 
ness to their divine purpose? That in short there 
should come a ruffling of the surfaces of thought, and, 
as in the story of the Pool of Siloam the descending 
spirits should disturb the depths of the spirits within us 
so that we might wash and be healed of doubt and 
doubting. 

This is on a higher plane of feeling and thought, and 



208 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

it might be not unaccompanied with natural portents, 
so that the world would feel itself ushered into a new 
strange arena of happenings, flashing above, round and 
through it, with a consequent thorough drawing to- 
gether of its populations. The message would be vast 
and inclusive; it might install a common faith, and 
aim, among all intelligences, whether Chinese, Indian, 
Mohammedan, or Christian, and by a miraculous 
metamorphosis transmute the slow and stumbling pro- 
cess of missionizing into a sudden realization. 

Our language presupposes the truth of the Christian 
creed in so far as the answers we are describing have 
been brought about by the Christian procedure and on 
the Christian hypothesis — and the consequences we see 
would mean a Christian empire; it could not fail to 
mean an eventual fusion of the races and the reconstruc- 
tion of civilization on some new common basis of toler- 
ance, sobriety, sense and continence. It is obvious 
that the answer in these ways might take a long time to 
complete itself, if ever completed, but its beginning 
might be quick and unmistakable, and so whether its 
end was seen or no, we should have rest for our soul. 

There is still another supreme possibility, one which 
doubtless occurs to the reader, and which we approach 
with infinite caution. According to Christian doctrine 
God has come to the earth; He might come again. Let 
us here withdraw presumptuous guesses, and curtail this 
revelry of fancies, turning our attention to the practical 
mental and moral consequences of the answer, viz., 
That there is a God; That there is a Future Life. 

It is pretty evident that a conclusion of this sort 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 209 

deeply realized, realized with certainty, would impart a 
peculiar throb and shock to actors and thinkers in this 
world. One cannot get away from the impression that 
the religious recrudescence which would follow might 
disastrously affect current activities, and pitch us all 
into a meditative scrutiny of ourselves, that might 
injuriously contract enterprise, and seriously damage 
literary and art production, and produce an average 
order of behaviour, fatal for the institutions of the 
police, the judiciary, and the newspapers. Therein is 
seen a reasonable excuse for our satisfaction, with things 
as they are. But that is paltry cynicism. Look at 
our changed relations. 

We would find ourselves in a world created and 
governed by design. Its aberrations would not be the 
less, the multitude of its miscarriages none the less evi- 
dent, its slow emergence from social disorder or injus- 
tice, as unpleasantly conspicuous, but how rapidly the 
forces of readjustment would assert themselves, with 
this reinforcement of certitude as to the world's 
ethical significance. Revelations in the past — the 
two commonly so called — have been sparks of flame, 
placed in an incombustible and water soaked wilder- 
ness. They have flickered, collapsed, started again, 
struggled, and though winning their way have been 
set in wholly hostile, envious, or refractory groups 
of circumstances. 

Today, after two thousand years of concerted think- 
ing and striving, with the modern methods of circula- 
tion, the unanimity in moral expression of the ruling 
states, the widely distributed culture, the amiable 



210 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

acquiescence in schemes of improvement, the cosmo- 
politanism of good purposes, a philosophical altruism, 
sensibility and just motives in presidents, potentates, 
and sovereigns, what rapid propulsion would be given 
to new ideas of government, and new ideals of personal 
conduct. A lot of things might happen, and happen 
very quickly. It would seem almost inevitable that 
war would be given up, and its present armaments 
vanish. 

A very considerable outpouring of religious fanati- 
cism might be expected, but the occasion might be pro- 
pitious also for uniting denominational Christendom 
into one church. Unworldliness might gain headway, 
and vanity and prodigality correspondingly shrink. It 
would distinctly usher in a new era, for whatever 
supernatural signs have been in the past, nothing even 
dimly similar could be imagined in them, to the ostenta- 
tious showing of God's hand before a world able to 
record and prove all it hears and sees, before in fact a 
strictly scientific culture. 

Of course the manifestations might follow very 
humble or obscure lines, but unless detected as the 
testimony to God's existence such a method would fail 
in perspicuity, it would fail also in enlisting conviction. 
And yet — so prone may God be to use dishonored or 
despised instrumentalities in his work — we should 
watch sharply for such proofs. But just how strangely 
we feel the world would be affected, just how keenly we 
realize the tumult and deep convulsion that would ensue 
upon some miraculous demonstration of God's presence 
in the universe, just so we measure precisely the present 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 211 

apathy or the present misgivings; not indeed that it is 
not clear that ordinary human activity, adventure and 
use would be impeded by a too embarrassing reference 
of every thing to God. 

Such waves of social excitement, the many hued 
aspects of mania, mysticism, religious extravagance, 
reformation, piety, austerity, eloquence, prayer, song, 
devotion, would finally lapse and subside, but it would 
seem likely that this revelation would remain incontes- 
table, that over it there could not gather the aspersion, 
denials, flattening explanations, or plausible impeach- 
ments which attacked and lamed — in a measure — the 
others: and indeed these others might thus escape 
further examination, and their moral and religious con- 
tents acquire new strength and real validity. 

There need be no wild and hazardous guess that the 
earth's affairs would seem to be less tangled, less acci- 
dental, or less vexatious than at present, but human 
action and human thought, very largely, would be made 
hereafter relevant to this fact — God's existence. And 
what a relevancy that would be! The immediate 
results in some directions might resemble those violent 
excesses which attended the New Testament revela- 
tion, and be equally intolerable, strange and supersti- 
tious, as for instance the eremitism of the Nile valley. 

There might be very disastrous upsets in business, in 
amusements, in art, in all the thousand and one tasks of 
daily life, and, as far as commercial chances went, God's 
announcement of Himself might mean bankruptcy 
and ruin. For there is no control possible to the whim- 
sical excess and unctuous surrender of a religious 



212 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

nature when its mental sections are weak or wanting. 
Yes; confusion worse confounded, but again what a 
reHef! How suddenly would the gravity and eternal 
consequences of living reassert themselves, and with 
what jejune hopelessness would Atheism resume its 
protests and disapprovals. 

God's declaration of Himself would mean also a future 
life, and before these two certainties, the civilized world 
might almost choose a voluntary extinction in a sub- 
lime suicide, through chastity and temperance. But 
such a result would prove only a momentary danger; 
the centuries would roll on, but to new ends. A new 
stamina would engross men, and knowledge and wisdom 
would reengage the problems of substance and idea, 
force and matter, but always related to the massive 
impression of God's imminence at every point and in 
every movement. A spiritualized fineness and firm- 
ness might become habitual, and with it perhaps, in 
shallow and harsh hearts persecution, intolerance, 
bigotry, and superstition. The hypocritical imperti- 
nence of sanctimonious humbugs would be in evidence, 
and in fact, from one point of view a revelation, a 
supernatural sign, feeding an idiocy inseparable from 
human nature, might seem quite undesirable. Re- 
ligion in so many becomes so silly, so painstakingly dis- 
agreeable, that calm indifference to the whole question 
might be a more sensible or serviceable regimen for 
daily life than too great confidence in God's existence 
and in His interest in us. Still that is quite aside from 
our purpose to discuss; we do not even believe it. 

The Plan contemplated nothing more than the asser- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 213 

tion of God's superintendency over, or His existence in 
the world without any supplementary advice as to His 
exact relations to the human society and the human 
individual, so that conditions continuing as they are, 
nations and statesmen, publicists and students of civics, 
philanthropy, and sociology, would still have their 
problems, and philosophy its enigmas. But with a 
difference. There would be a certain tacit assumption 
of the underlying essence, and cosmogonies and phi- 
losophies would hardly escape the helpful reference. It 
is difficult to conceive exactly how the redeveloped 
consciousness of God would act, how it would re- 
generate or change living. Thousands today act and 
live in this way doubtless, though without outwardly 
showing a trace of the fixity of their religious thought, 
and of course to thousands God is absolutely non- 
existent, and to them God's reinstallment, as it were, 
might prove painful, unnecessary, and become quickly 
disregarded, if the events we have suggested as possible, 
came as a consequence, or seemed to come as a conse- 
quence, to the Plan's execution, the years about them 
would be sensibly swayed and influenced by them, but 
the rapid flight of half a century would dim their 
sensuous impressiveness, and leave them again exposed 
to skepticizing and repudiation. But such a move- 
ment of skepticism would be less plausible than for- 
merly; as we have said {ante). It would maintain a 
very doubtful struggle. 

There are considerations however which suggest that 
possibily radical rearrangement of society would ensue. 
It cannot truthfully be said that today human life 



214 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

counts for much in many eyes, and that the contempla- 
tion of savages in the wilderness of the world, the horde 
of half supported workers in the countries of Europe 
suggests to them much else than expeditious expedients 
for eliminating both, which presupposes the conception 
that human life has only a commercial relation to itself, 
and that it must be so far discouraged as it interferes 
with the prosperity of the better kinds (and there can 
be no doubt as to grades of human life) of human life, 
or brings on a competition in employment in such better 
kinds as to mean degradation, industrial slavery, and 
individual hebetude. In other words human life has, 
in the eyes of a large and educated class, lost individual 
significance, but represents a product which must be 
constantly improved, and kept strictly proportioned in 
amount to the work required of it, to the sustenance 
it can win, and to a progressive standard of civil and 
domestic life. 

Under a reconstituted attitude towards human life, 
authorized perhaps by the revelation or portents we 
have considered, some kind of readjustment might 
follow in states. It would become a paramount duty to 
provide a life for every child, and that optimistic view 
of the Catholic church which promotes marriage, and 
regards every birth as preordained and divinely per- 
missive, might be generally entertained. There would 
certainly follow an injection of socialistic procedure in 
the city and state. We could anticipate more paternal 
control and perhaps the slow emergence of a Christian 
socialistic community, in whose train a great number of 
new social features would develop and a great number 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 215 

of present day business phenomena disappear. The 
words of Prof. Rogers (History of Philosophy) applied 
to the aboriginal life might be applicable to this new- 
mould of society formed under the sudden impetus of a 
flood of new designs and motives; ''life is far more of a 
unity for primitive man than it is for us today. The 
social organization is no compound of warring and self- 
seeking individuals, but each man finds his life without 
question in the community life about him, and accepts 
the community ideals." 

Probably all such developments would disappear, at 
a greater and greater distance from the revelation, and 
society in three or four hundred years would resume its 
individualistic facies, but they would be computable 
results at first. And yet they might not. Observe we 
have only postulated a sign from God, not a mission ^ 
and the absence of this last, the absence of a personal 
enthusiasm and personal message might leave to the 
sign its mystery, but would rob it of permanent effects 
because it did not bring with it a professed following of 
evangelists and scribes. 

The really significant and important thing would be 
the involution of God as an indisputable and genera- 
tive principle in philosophy and in science, and his re- 
installation, above them and their work, to those who 
often find the burden of living almost intolerable, and 
its rewards delusive. That would indeed be worth 
while. It would give a new zest of living, and it would 
reanimate Christian homiletics, and so impart a lively 
efficacy to creeds, now getting dull and faded, and sim- 
ply worn to tatters from repetition. It might sober 



216 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

life a little, in places a good deal, but to those craving or 
claiming religious illumination it would break the day- 
light into rainbows. 

The immediate effect of importing a virtual responsi- 
bility upon society for every one born within its limits 
would be to increase assistance to the unfortunately 
born, and probably greatly extend the protection of the 
state over the young. The view of Mr. De Forest, 
expressed but yesterday, would be endorsed and its 
implications heartily accepted. Mr. De Forest said; 
''twenty-five years ago we were ready to accept poverty 
as a permanent condition, and our efforts were mainly 
directed to making its ills less intolerable. Now we 
are ashamed of our craven lack of faith. Today we 
believe that most poverty is a curable disease. It is 
still true that the poor are always with us. So long as 
human nature is what it is there will always be those 
who are poor from causes internal to themselves, from 
disability, physical and mental, and all those weak- 
nesses which range from carelessness to crime, but the 
great bulk of poverty, from adverse social conditions, 
from disease and vice need not always be with us." 

This would naturally result from a conviction that 
God's manifestation meant a corroboration of the two 
preceding revelations, and in them each individual 
seems to secure an individual and purposeful destiny. 
This would be attended by ameliorations, transplanta- 
tion of the crowded from the cities to the country, 
drastic repression of ''white slavery," and easements 
in prisons; perhaps an absolute recognition of the 
claim, in the division of profits among servants, em- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 217 

ployees, etc. All such advanced ideals of social life are 
known today in the United States, the interesting thing 
to note would be their possible adoption in the bar- 
barism of Europe. And then another speculative fore- 
cast, conceives the reception this revelation would be 
given among all non-Christian peoples, to what extent 
its influence might proselytize the world. The matter 
arrests attention, especially in view of M. Gabriel 
Tarde's remarkable reflections on the "Laws of Imita- 
tion." In this striking book, a little we think hurt by 
aphoristic smartness, and a too absolute application of 
the theory to all circumstances of social range and 
change, we are shown how idea and custom, philosophy 
or creed, and action spread by imitation, by that spon- 
taneity with which identical beings do or think identical 
things, when through initiative an originator among 
them points the way, inaugurates the custom, or reveals 
the idea. "All resemblances" says Tarde "of social 
origin in society are the direct or indirect fruit of the 
various forms of imitation — custom imitation, or 
fashion imitation, sympathy imitation or obedience 
imitation, precept imitation, or education imitation, 
naive imitation, deliberate imitation, etc." "This 
fact" he says, "is apparent in our European societies, 
where the extraordinary progress of fashion in all its 
forms in dress, food, and housing, in wants and ideas, 
in institutions and arts, in making a single type of 
European based upon several hundreds of millions of 
examples." 

But transferred to higher planes the law of imitation 
may work transformations which would be world wide, 



218 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

and belong to the greatest processes conceivable of 
standardizing the whole world with a philosophical or 
religious homogeneity. There is no doubt at the same 
time about what Tarde calls ''refraction," by which 
the incidence of the same idea in a mental medium 
different from that of its origin assumes a varying phase, 
as for instance, to use his illustration, Theocritus is 
refracted in Virgil, Menander in Terence, Plato in 
Cicero (not, we think, a good analogy) Euripides in 
Racine. Desire and belief are ultimate motives or 
motif forces in stimulating or realizing imitations, and 
in the subsidizing of mankind to a common state. 

To quote Tarde again ''Mankind, as well as the in- 
dividual man, always moves in the direction of the 
greatest truth and power, of the greatest sum of con- 
viction and confidence, in a word, of the greatest attain- 
able belief and we may question whether this maximum 
can be reached through the development of discussion, 
competition, and criticism, or, inversely through their 
suppression, and through imitation of a single expand- 
ing, and at the same time compact thought or volition." 
Now Tarde in his attempt at a formulation of the Laws 
of Imitation has separated them into Logical and Extra- 
Logical, and of the Logical he says; "Logical causes 
operate whenever an individual prefers a given innova- 
tion to others because he thinks it is more useful or more 
true than others, that is, more in accord than they are 
with the aims or principles that have already found a 
place in his mind." 

The processes of imitation are today working with 
extraordinary vigor towards the assimilation of a com- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 219 

mon doctrine and common practice. Success, physical, 
emotional, moral, and mental attaching to the ideas of 
Christian civilization, or to some higher aspect of that 
civilization, must bring its tenets or its practice more 
and more intensely within the focalized attention of 
other civilizations, and the logical causes for imitation, 
given above, will quickly act: they will enforce a sub- 
stitution of the Christian culture for a culture hostile or 
different, they will overwhelmingly, when through 
intercourse and the rapidly increasing avenues or instru- 
ments of contact and communication peoples strike 
peoples harder and harder, blend the inhabitants of this 
spinning and tiny sphere into sociological and psycho- 
logical conformity. And should such a great and 
glittering fact as the sign we now are considering, come 
in reality among men, how stupendously it might 
accelerate that imitation which we already perceive is 
gathering the nations and races of the earth to the 
standard of a Christian confession. For it is pointed out 
in the most interesting section of his book (the Extra- 
Logical Laws of Imitation) by M. Tarde, that the 
assumption of ideas, sentiments, precedes the copying 
of habit, practice, or etiquette; hence with a further- 
ance of the merely objective witnesses to its value, by a 
revealing act, the previous seeding of its interior super- 
iority in the minds or hearts of alien cultures, would 
infinitely hasten the intellectual and sentimental fusion 
of the earth. 

After all, the point gained would be the assertion of 
God's reality, possibly also the implication of another 
life, but all this rather as an argued result from the 



220 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

signs or portents, than especially as any kind of verbal 
proclamation. Life would become expressive of re- 
sponsibility, of supramundane connection, and the 
influx of scientific determinism would sensibly retreat. 
Such an interjection and adumbrant vision of Himself 
by God, does seem to grow increasingly imperative, if 
the present crisis of apostacy is to be successfully 
passed, for though this Plan as here outlined rests for 
its plausibility upon christian theorems yet, as is shown 
in the next chapter, we are sternly cognizant of me- 
chanical developments in society and in government, 
which the future may bring and bring all the more 
quickly if there is no corroborative accent from the assumed 
seats of divine revelation. 



CHAPTER IX 
The Alternative 

But suppose there is no sign, no answer, no revela- 
tion; just the same unchanged skies, remorseless 
retinue of seasons, succession of night and day, the 
flowage of phenomena known to us from childhood, and 
the iteration of death and birth, struggle and romance, 
daily duties, distracting pleasures, and hard work. 
What then? Shall the earth yet wait, and in the pres- 
ence of an aggressive and fairly bewildering assault of 
doubt, flourishing its challenges under the leadership of 
learning and science still cling to its formularies, and, 
with unassuaged ardor still kneel and pray? If the 
provocations that seem to justify the Plan are as 
weighty as we assume, then it is not an illogical con- 
clusion that either there is no God, or that He is silent, 
or that He does not care, and the mere mention of these 
alternatives must permanently asphyxiate faith and 
start thought on a new measure of speculation and 
practical government, into new roles of instrumenta- 
tion and economy. 

It would certainly mean that the inhabitants of the 
earth are to take their problems up, one by one, and 
settle them by themselves, unrelieved by the hope of 
divine interposition, and under the guidance of experi- 
ence and reasoned out deductions. Could any thing 
be more legitimate? The issue of a physical dilemma 



222 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

is presented to us in which no spiritual correctives are 
discernible. There are sickness, pauperism and crime all 
about us; there are large classes of "undesirable citi- 
zens," there are imperfect execution ofgood laws, whole- 
sale opportunities for roguery and deceit, overcrowding 
of habitations, neglect of health, ruinous dissipation, 
moral restraint leading to misery of body and mind, 
loss of power in the social machine, and iniquitous in- 
equalities in the distribution of wealth and chances. 

There is a wholly malign competition between 
individuals and nations. We can conceive of a very 
different state of affairs, and we construct ideals in 
writing, which responsively intimate that these ideals 
might be realized in fact. Is it not true that the present 
conditions have grown up upon underlying assumptions 
based on Christian dogma, that we are each what we 
are, by some sort of predestination, and have also grown 
up upon an antecedent and traditional organization of 
society, and that such alterations in this society along 
the lines of freedom and democratization have de- 
veloped against opposition which has cost lives, 
desolated homes, and introduced natural rights against 
the fierce contradiction of privileges and titles and 
hereditary power? 

Is it not also true that the world has submitted to 
slow measures of amelioration — indeed is now making 
much progress in such directions — but because forced 
to a dead and live issue, the economical regeneration of 
society would involve hereafter incalculable changes, 
and a partial subversion perhaps of inherited prejudices 
and beliefs, not to mention the thick and thin allegiance 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 223 

to a classified society, which would find itself shocked 
and pained and outraged? 

Now suppose that a massive sense of loneliness 
entered the consciousness of men, that they felt them- 
selves rudderless and unobserved in the material and 
spiritually void universe, strange heirs to a stranger 
mystery, and absolutely confined within the powers 
and motions of their own minds to make their way, or 
to establish themselves on some material footing of 
happiness? 

Is it then a preposterous attempt for them to set up a 
devised and artificially arranged system which accord- 
ing to their best lights would bring them the dispensa- 
tion of peace and joy; understanding peace and joy to 
mean a rational use of the pleasures of the earth, with 
their diffusion over every one to the extent of their 
natural capabilities to appreciate, or their physical abil- 
ity to appropriate them? Would it be unreasonable for 
publicists to argue that there were no longer any bonds 
with the past, that need be considered, and that on the 
tabula rasa of complete elimination of the claims of the 
past, renunciation of its bequests, it became the proper 
thing for the world to remake its social fabric, weaving 
into it whatever it best might of science and satisfaction? 

Take for instance this enormous solecism called 
Europe, with its separate governing establishments, its 
various armies, and multiplied expenses of mainte- 
nance, not to mention its perpetuation of prejudice and 
international friction. What a monstrous absurdity 
from the view point of common sense and economy! 
How very naturally philosophic publicists have 



224 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

dreamed of a United Europe, with all its duplicated and 
reduplicated systems of bureaucracy replaced by more 
simple and coordinated governments. 

And then its internal problems; let them be also 
summarily settled in the interest of enlightenment and 
humanity. Demolish this stupid and sanguinary Rus- 
sia, wipe its dynasty off the face of the earth, and sub- 
ject it to rational control, delete Turkey and supplant 
its decadent rule with modern and sanitary methods. 
Let there be among the states of the earth a forcible 
expugment of the vicious, the incompetent, the loiter- 
ing and obstructive and a reconcentration along lines of 
least resistance, of mental stability and economic justice 
as well, let us say, along lines of idealistic beauty. 

It is hard to believe that this could be accomplished 
except by War. H. G. Wells has put this plainly 
(Anticipations) and has illustrated the possible conden- 
sation of Europe around one linguistic and social nu- 
cleus into a confirmed and static unity, Asia around 
another, and America around a third, which should be 
these United States of America. 

Take again the innumerable interior questions of 
countries, of governments, their disease, their inter- 
ferring poverty, their criminal classes and their irregular 
and excessive procreative results. These ask for re- 
formation, for repression, or extirpation, and the whole- 
sale application of scientific schemes of improvement, if 
such can certainly be discovered. 

We would be confronted in all this with an absorbing, 
confident, and irresistible ruling impetus which will 
work coercively, intelligently and express itself in 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 225 

mental gestures of a lofty disinterested embodiment of 
righteousness and austere intellectualism. A rather 
impossible dream it might appear, and quite analogous 
to an imaginable oligarchy of tyrannous empiricists and 
cranks. But a process like this is inevitable, it grows 
today in diassociated groups of intrepid and convinced 
thinkers; it would be the counterpart of regenerative 
movements that we have seen, in the last chapter, 
would be inaugurated under the dispensation of a 
revelation announcing the existence of God, and the 
certainty of a Future Life. 

For in both cases an authoritative impulse arises to 
advance social conditions to higher and more satisfac- 
tory planes, to start influences — even actually to devise 
and execute laws — of obliteration of older and diseased 
conditions. But there would be an obvious and tem- 
peramental difference in the action and the actors in 
two such schemes of improvement. 

In the first — that taking place under the ascertained 
certainty of God — the doers would represent the 
sympathetic and softened consciousness of the Christian 
philanthropist, not indeed dispossessed of an urgent 
sense of responsibility and not devoid of firmness, but 
sensibly actuated by love and the considerations of 
Christian brotherhood. The rectifiers of society in the 
latter case — where the reference to God of reformatory 
plans disappears — would be more hardy, more ruth- 
lessly harsh upon disorder, and represent a reasoned out 
code of scientific precision in bringing the whole world, 
in some fashion, in line with extreme rational principles 
of construction and growth. 



226 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

It is not unfair to say that today speculative progress 
has been made along such lines, and the work of Wells, 
Galton, Stanley-Hall, Starbuck, etc., show unanimity 
of design and identity of aims.* 

But there is an overwhelming importance attachable 
to this Plan, and its issues. It must, either way, act as 
a dislocating jolt to previous opinions, to the half settled 
way of regarding the two deep questions this book is 
concerned in asking. If a revelation comes no one can 
measurably estimate the astounding consequences, or 
quite exactly foresee its psychological or emotional 
products. We all realize that today these questions are 
shoved by many, into the rubbish heaps of unnecessary 
and annoying problems, problems purely vexatious 
because insoluble. By others they are regarded as 
settled in such a prescribed manner as their denomina- 
tional faith illustrates, but even then with a nugatory 
and insipid style of assent. They do not discuss them 
with much unction, and they carefully suppress any 
vituperative zeal against those who deny them alto- 
gether. This latter class — those who deny the common 
faith — is a very large one, numerically it perhaps ex- 
ceeds any solid group of antagonistic opinion. It has 
increased amazingly, and the whole current of contem- 
poraneous literature, the book expression of modernism 
distinctly enforces, propagates, and applauds it. 

*It does not seem unlikely that there might arise a rehabilitation of slavery 
for economic purposes and the racial elevation of inferior classes; civilization 
would become profoundly utilitarian, with a drastic assortment of men to their 
appropriate places, and an institution of slavery properly dispensed and 
guarded against abuse or cruelty might become in certain climatic provinces 
the industrial groundwork of society. Plato's republic or the division of labor 
in ant communities might gain a substantial reflection in our human aggre- 
gates. 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 227 

Lastly there are the groups of believers who register 
daily unshakable vows to believe the orthodox state- 
ments, and who shun discussion, operate exclusively 
their thought amid known conventions of religion and 
develop an esoteric serenity through the conventional 
practice of worship. 

To all these several assemblages of contrasted think- 
ing, or unthinking, men and women, the revelation the 
Plan seeks, would come with profoundly disturbing 
tremors. To be a revelation at all, for our purpose, it 
must be indisputable, and carry in its method the most 
stringent arguments for accuracy. This positivism 
then would actually arrest the attention of the most 
shallow, the most irreverent, or the most obdurate 
while, in spite of all their professed anticipations the 
believers would be sharply shaken. On the other hand 
the failure of our Plan — a Plan solemnly prepared and 
rigorously observed with the full responsible endorse- 
ment and observance of the whole Christian and the 
whole religious world — would, not so pervasively, but 
quite feelingly bring its surprise, its awakening amaze- 
ment. 

It is this awakening, in either case, that would prove 
to be the concussion necessary to start mankind upon 
its new era of social change. The ground of course has 
been made ready, the seed is sown, and with either of 
these declarative and serious results the process of 
alteration might be violently started. Mr. Wells has 
eloquently lamented that we seem — and he is speaking 
for the New Republicans — to be in a state of quasi 
stagnation, doing a great deal of thinking, a great deal 



228 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

of listening, overmuch declamation, but are not advanc- 
ing bodily upon the highways of beneficent reforma- 
tion ; "to state these questions is like opening the door of 
a room that has long been locked and deserted. One 
has a lonely feeling. There are quite remarkably no 
other voices here, and the rusty hinges echo down 
empty passages that were quite threateningly full of 
men seventy or eighty years ago. But I am only one 
very insignificant member of a class of inquirers in 
England who started upon the question why are we 
becoming inefficient a year or two ago, and from what 
starting point it is I came to this — I do not believe 
therefore that upon this dusty threshold I shall stand 
long alone. We take most calmly the most miraculous 
of things, and it is only quite recently that I have come 
to see as amazing this fact, that while the greater mass 
of our English-speaking people is living under the pro- 
fession of democratic Republicanism, there is no party, 
no sect, no periodical, no teacher either in Great Britain 
or America or the Colonies, to hint at a proposal to 
abolish the aristocratic and monarchical elements in the 
British system. There is no revolutionary spirit over 
here, and very little missionary spirit over there. The 
great mass of the present generation on both sides of 
the Atlantic takes hardly any interest in this issue at 
all. It is as if the question was an impossible one, out- 
side the range of thinkable things. Or as if the last 
word in this controversy w^as said before our grand 
fathers died." 

Now, excessively and intensely descriptive and en- 
thusiastic as Mr. W^ells is, perhaps no one, deliberately 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 229 

weighing his projects and his criticism, would literally 
adopt the former, or unreservedly endorse the latter. 
The matter is of small moment as to detail. His 
obstreperous earnestness, at any rate, is aimed at this 
question — shall not the utmost possible efficiency of a 
nation be secured, and if Yes, then he discusses how we 
may reach that end. We cannot indefinitely stay as 
we are, the Future will open doors into vastnesses of 
social plans which will put upon social life, upon the 
exterior aspects of trade, government, habitation, 
domesticity, amusement, literature and art a most 
amazing contrast to their present relations to life in 
general and to the individual. At least we think so. 

But the present hesitates before that future. It 
stands apprehensively before a door upon which its 
hand rests, but from which it withdraws with indecision. 
It slightly shivers before the irrelevancy of new ideals. 
The world is on the whole pleasant and entertaining, 
safe, agreeable, and brimming over daily with novelties 
in ideas, discoveries, and mechanical projects. Why 
plunge into a new chaos of revolutionary propagandas, 
and stir into frantic acerbity, the invaded interests of 
hereditary wealth or aspiring money-making, or over- 
set the petted and rooted customs of the modern 
sybarite? Mr. Wells and his votaries confront a co- 
lossal inertness, and exactly because ninety percent of 
the people who rule and do things are contented. But 
with the success or failure of our Plan an emotional 
exaltation, or a mental dislodgment, is formidably 
involved. Either way the masonry of existing condi- 
tions will be shattered, and expansive ideas springing 



230 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

into the gaping rents will increase the dislocation. This 
would appear to be inevitable. 

Now the contrasted movements attendant upon the 
dual developments might we think with safety be 
characterized as, in case of a revelation, idealistic pro- 
pulsion, and, in the case of its refusal, materialistic 
dreams. A new idea, a whole phalanx of ideas would 
surge upward upon the troubled surface of thinking life, 
and they would, in the excited and poised state of the 
popular fancy spread. As M. Tarde says; "the fact 
that a new taste or idea has taken root in a mind which 
is constituted in a certain fashion carries with it no 
reason why this innovation should not spread more or 
less rapidly through an indefinite number of supposedly 
like minds in communication with one another. It 
would spread instantaneously through all these minds, 
if they were absolutely alike, and if their intercommuni- 
cation was perfect. It is this ideal, an ideal that is 
happily beyond realization that we are fast approach- 
ing." 

In this chapter under the caption of the Alternative, 
we are concerned in sketching simply the hedonistic 
consequences of God's Silence; the silence would be 
the essential point weighed, even though silence forms 
no incontrovertible argument against God's presence. 
Granted then that the world of thought confronted this 
conviction — arising let us presume, and arising not 
illogically, from the failure of the Plan to evoke a re- 
sponse — what might be expected to follow? In the 
first place the mental control of the world would force 
forward into public prominence some asserveration or 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 231 

corollary of this sort; a practical conclusion to the 
whole matter is that we must look after ourselves, that 
we must adopt the artificial system which will bring the 
greatest happiness to the greatest number or if not that 
the greatest happiness to all; we must extend to the 
many the maximum enjoyment; this life is all, and the 
organization of society should contribute simply to the 
evolution of the greatest health, the greatest strength, 
the greatest achievements possible to human effort, 
and, proceeding along the lines of the least resistance, 
bring to each one all the enjoyment and promise his 
faculties and constitution permit, pushing him into 
those avocations which best suit him, and in which he 
can return to the community the results legitimately 
expected. 

We must entrench ourselves on morality as the only 
safeguard to our physical and political or civic 
continuity, moulding all the activities around the 
central unit of the Home, but so coordinating every 
action, every motion, that there can be no waste, no 
extravagance, no disuse, no misapplication, no idleness, 
no disease, but only a concentrated substantial effi- 
ciency, that will bear fruit in work, and discovery^ 
postulating, as perhaps the last triumph, the perpetua- 
tion of human life, and a sort of hieratic power over the 
forces and elements of nature. 

Of course this would mean a gigantic socialism, or 
several big concretions of socialism, or it might even 
mean a congeries and groups of small socialisms, 
adapted to language and temperament, and all ani- 
mated or ruled, like a siderial system, by a dominant 



232 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

law of progress, in the direction of health, manners, and 
knowledge, and art. The picture can be made most 
refined and most stimulating. But the evident out- 
come to our mind is this, that the new society that may 
arise will really be less directed to the immediate pro- 
curement of large average individual ability than it will 
to the immediate suffusion of material pleasure, to the 
provision for genial and helpful physical conditions for 
all, so that the young may marry — within of course the 
limitations of inclination and desire — the old may re- 
main content and fed, and every one find a natural life 
amid stimulations of exercise, work, play, and recrea- 
tion. Suffering and poverty are the tap roots of the 
vice and crime of the world, and as long as those incur- 
able tendrils draw from the soil of destitution, penury, 
and ignorance, the poisons of envy, malice, rage and 
lusts, they will bear these cleistogamous buds and resist 
extermination. 

The new state or states will aim to give to each, 
proper living conditions, so that with the sunshine of 
contentment the noxious soils in which the social 
poisons hide may be refreshed and purified. In these 
United States today, this is, in a wonderful degree true 
now, and it would seem therefore indicated that the 
readjustment of other societies must begin with some 
sort of a democratic state. The various culture and the 
development of the ideals, and that stringent propul- 
sion of the most able forward, which Mr. Wells has so 
ingeniously and invitingly sketched, might follow. 
But at first the whole energy of the New Republics 
would be stretched towards the goal of mere social 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 233 

eugenics, family life — with probably procreative limits 
— and a distinguishable distribution of opportunity, 
and with it the rights of property and the rights of 
personal liberty. For no socialism which intends a 
magnified Oneida community, a Brook Farm, or a New 
Harmony, is tolerable, in thought or practice. The 
crude and detestable pressure of every one in the same 
mould, the forced contiguity of dissimilar natures, and 
tastes, and the elimination of the private home with its 
industries, ambitions, decorations, and intimate and 
ramified history, as men are and as they increasingly 
become, will fail. Instead of a fabric of multiplied 
parts, each with its molecular unity and separateness, 
and glowing with its individual satisfactions, there 
would be a doughy mass, consistent, compacted, and 
serviceable perhaps but incapable of creativeness, of 
amplitudes of social vibration, of originality, or of the 
rush upward of individual types. 

However it is unnecessary, if it were in our power 
possible, to estimate or draw the details of the process, 
that would ensue when mankind — the educated and 
civilized sections of mankind — undertakes in a common 
and manifold way, to place itself upon a new ulterior 
footing of social, economic, and civic construction. We 
feel sure that there would be a newer and wide utiliza- 
tion of the earth, with probably the forcible extinction 
of the savage, the useless, the torpid, with a possible 
reduction of many to a literal slavery, a general house- 
cleaning of the earth, sweeping clean its dusty corners, 
and emptying into the ocean of oblivion the dross, rust, 
and ashes, of decrepitude, superstition, and aimless 



234 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

aboriginal cults. It is pretty easy to see that much of 
the labyrinthine intricacy and the picturesque strange- 
ness and the untidy prodigality of contrasts in the 
world, as we know it, would vanish, but there should be 
no lamentation over that; the end in view would be the 
occupation of the world with happy men and women, 
living natural lives under moral restraints, while a vast 
intellectual astuteness grows and grows, in depth and 
comprehension, building up perfection of knowing, and 
with it perfection of execution and designing. 

Now the shock of feeling that brings on so speedily 
this momentous change, these consecutive materio- 
idealistic steps towards some ''far off end," would be, 
according to our hypothesis, the realization that God 
either does not exist, or that He is impassive, and rele- 
gates the conduct of this earth in its organized social 
aspects, to the best thought, the wisest councils, the 
scientific prescience of its workers and investigators. 
The effect of a real consciousness of loneliness, and an 
abandonment of the dim or acute sense of a God, would 
be of course very considerable. Such a conclusion we 
may imagine would be bitterly opposed, but the 
majority would sweep into power on a wave of practi- 
cal atheism. 

If we reflect for a moment on the removal from our 
mental background of the idea of a God, we do indeed 
reach a feeling of extreme despondency. We become 
as it were orphans in a universe destitute of sympathy, 
and borne to some certain doom by the cosmic tendency 
to ruin; the spiritual backgrounds are removed, and 
aspirations could no longer cling to a transcendental 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 235 

goal of recognition and approval. It would be so at 
first, but like deserted children, or men and women in a 
wreck, we might become influenced by our common 
fate to draw together, and even more quickly inaugu- 
rate the helpful sharing of the commot lot, and so 
slowly entrench ourselves in a philosophy, not cynical, 
but brave, a little stoical, interested, and resigned, and 
probably not unmingled with optimistic eloquence. 

Were this experiment ever tried, this Plan ever tested, 
it might be sincerely hoped that God would indeed 
speak, and that society might move into its final forms 
on this earth, under the incitements of religious senti- 
ment, rather than guided — however wisely — by the 
godless edicts of scientific infallibility, with the con- 
centrated brilliancy and eagerness of a momentary 
existence, as the disk of illumination from an arc light, 
thrown by a passing steamboat on the banks of a river, 
has every instant within its ring of light an intense 
interest, but all the contents of that ring are the next 
moment lost in impenetrable gloom. 

The aim of this brief treatise is now attained. We 
have suggested an experiment of momentous meaning. 
It seriously touches the deepest emotions of our beings, 
and has respect to the deepest needs of our life; and 
yet, if there is no God, neither those emotions or those 
needs can continue to be discussed. Our consciousness 
in this respect must be reformed, and a large amount of 
its mental furniture or its mental dress, become sud- 
denly mythical, fabulous, impossible. 

The project embodied in this book has a preposterous 
look. It may appear to many as a sacrilegious and 



236 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

foolish essay, a silly interpolation of human curiosity 
against the stern and eternal silences of the Almighty, 
as if a child, urged by some precocious whim should ask 
his parents the reason of their being, and decline obedi- 
ence unless the rationale and the meaning of his rela- 
tion to them was lucidly revealed to him. This would 
be styled an impertinence in the child, or at least a 
fantastic oddity, and the answer might be either a 
reprimand or some more touching illustration of the 
father's authority. 

The analogy is false and the criticism is unfair. Mr. 
Froude has written that ''no honest soul can look out 
upon the world, and see it as it really is, without the 
question rising in him whether there be any God that 
governs it all," and, if the truth was fully known about 
the last interior sensations of the heart of men 
today, it would prove to be, I think, a surprising 
and not reassuring revelation of uncertainty, and 
clouded reticences. We are not children even in our 
presumed relations to God, but have certainly been 
endowed with prerogatives of inquiry and judgement. 
The very critical value of this knowledge entitles us to 
use up all means at our command for its settlement. 
When we turn to science, and no ears can afford to be 
deaf to science, and its affirmations today, we enter a 
field of beautiful theories, supported by marshalled facts, 
we see the phenomena of nature unfolded and explained, 
we are led backward into a history of events which 
seems to be a detailed demonstration of law, and while 
a thinking being might postulate God from all these 
observations and their elucidation, yet as a matter of 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 237 

record we are furnished that belief from a book which 
— containing a revelation — is at odds w^ith all this 
science and research. 

No one can doubt that w^ho has read Huxley's two 
books, Science and the Hebrew Tradition, and Science 
and the Christian Tradition. There is indeed in this 
Book a world of lofty and noble sentiment, adages of 
comfort in bereavement and sorrow, moral codes and 
soaring songs of faith and adoration ; it carries in it no 
wilted message of compromising indulgence, and loses 
no note of emphasis in its strong and simple injunctions, 
but its material groundwork, its secular framework, is 
discredited, and the voice which is supposed to be 
speaking in it should speak to us again, and with w^hat 
just urgency may we not claim it! 

The speculative forecast of a community living with- 
out a God and the abandonment of all this vast and 
gracious tradition which is associated with the Bible, is 
fraught with dread and alarm ; is it wrong to avert any 
such catastrophe by an appeal to God for His reasser- 
tion? 

The note of expeditious subserviency can here be 
heard. Why, it can be asked, disturb our peace of 
mind, why undertake an experiment perhaps mischiev- 
ously and willfully conceived, and impossible of suc- 
cessful execution, and upon its failure leave the world 
still more confused, more undecided, and more re- 
bellious; moral philosophy and common sense, and the 
dictates of prudential statesmanship tell us the funda- 
mental necessity of this belief in a God as the criterion 
and arbiter of human conduct, why run the risk of 



238 THE WORLD^S PRAYER 

losing this belief altogether, and shipwreck civilization 
for the indefinite chance of success in a meretricious and 
an unseemly invention? 

Well the answer is directly pertinent. It is that the 
loss of this belief is progressively increasing, that with 
thousands and thousands it lingers as a semblance and 
shell, holding no concrete and definite substance of 
faith, and that that same subversion of civilization — if 
it will be a subversion — will eventually come at a 
calculably distant period, when the widening contagion 
of unbelief will displace the belief itself. About this 
there can be no question. To be sure it is just conceiv- 
able that God might avert that by an interposition of 
His own initiative, some such interposition as we are 
here seeking to secure, and it is conceivable that it is 
His purpose to do so, when the delicacy of the balance 
between unbelievers and believers is shifting towards 
the side of the former; or else it is a matter of no con- 
cern to Him. 

Now as a distinct statistical condition we are told 
that just that shifting has already taken place. Com- 
mon observation shows in this city that the churches 
are empty, with the exception of the Catholic, and they 
hesitatingly hold their own, while the Jewish syna- 
gogues grow from numerical additions through immi- 
gration. In Europe something very similar has come 
about, judging from the patent revulsion from the 
church in France and in Italy, and even in Spain. 

If we attempt to enlist the precision of figures this 
does not seem borne out. According to Dr. H. K. Car- 
roll there were in the United States in 1890 nearly fifty- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 239 

seven million believers or adherents of all creeds and 
denominations, and perhaps some five million of non- 
believers and passive indififerents. The figures are 
probably overestimated, at least those for the churches 
but taking them as they are, and comparing them with 
the census reports for 1900 the tendency to disintegra- 
tion and loss among the orthodox communions is not 
marked. 

The increase of adherents in the large denominations 
in the United States — Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, 
Lutheran, Presbyterian — certainly at first barely keeps 
pace with the increase of population, but latterly seems 
to exceed it, as the adjoined table (not probably 
rigidly accurate) shows: 





CHURCHES 


PER- 
CENTAGE 
+ OR- 


POPULATION 


PER- 
CENTAGE 
-f OR- 


1900 


21,725,000 




79,393,000 




1901 


21,834,000 


+ .5 


79,893,000 


+ .63 


1902 


23,088,507 


+ .508 


80,200,000 


+ .385 


1903 


23,000,000 


- .34 


81,000,000 


+ 1.00 


1904 


23,624,000 


-f2.71 


82,000,000 


+ 1.23 


1905 


24,184,000 


-f-2.37 


83,500,000 


+ .61 


1906 


25,155,000 


+4.01 


85,568,000 


+ 2.48 


1909 


34,517,377 




90,372,266 




1910 


35,332,776 


-1-2.37 


91,972,266 


+ 1.75 


1911 


36,095,085 


+5.00 


93,572,266 


+ 1.73 


1912 


36,668,165 


+ 1.03 


95,172,266 


+ 1.72 


1913 


38,059,428 


+3.77 


96,772,266 


+ 1.65 



The estimates after 1906 are made upon the entire 
census of all denominations excluding members of the 
Hebrew Faith, who may number two million. The 
evident approximation and the actual increase of the 
percentages of the church-growth with those of the 
population are misleading. A large portion of the 
increase in population is to be attributed to emigra- 



240 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

tion, and the emigrants, for the most part are attached, 
nominally at least, to some denomination, which im- 
parts to the church census of members a deceptive 
appearance of enlargement. Church membership or 
Church attendance is a variable function, in some or 
many instances, of temporal states, and both prosperity 
and adversity send their recipients to church. 

Robertson has affirmed that the "nineteenth century 
closed on a record of free-thinking progress which may 
be said to outbulk that of all previous centuries of the 
modern era together," and he further intimates that "in 
no other age is to be found the phenomenon of wide 
spread critical skepticism among the laboring classes." 
He points out in Germany that in an increasing pro- 
portion the theological students come from the rural 
districts, the towns furnishing even fewer among 
the Catholic population; though it has grown from 
ten millions in 1830, to sixteen millions in 1880; the 
number of theological students has fallen from eleven 
to four per one hundred thousand inhabitants. 

The continent of Europe has evinced this tendency 
more strikingly than England, and it may well be 
thought that in Russia with its uncontrolled barbarity, 
masquerading under the profession of a church, there 
must have taken place large secessions from orthodoxy, 
and unguarded and violent reactions towards agnosti- 
cism and denial. Every where it must be remembered 
there is also the deterrent fear among the established 
and prosperous that the rejection of deism means — as 
in many cases it certainly does — political radicalism 
and social subversions so that a cloak of belief in great 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 241 

numbers thinly hides only the personal dread of rash 
sociological or political experiments. 

Again as Prof. Royce has said in one of his essays 
(Problems of Good and Evil), "men do not like to have 
the foundations of their lives shaken; and when these 
foundations have never been rationalized, and have no 
better warrant than unthinking custom, the mere 
motion to examine them critically, seems to be risking 
the solidity of the whole social structure, and is re- 
sented accordingly." Such a conservative and pre- 
servative restraint is naturally strong in the English, 
but there is little reason to question the increase of 
skepticism among these tough hearted and invincibly 
rooted traditionists. 

However, be the mere numerical showing of de- 
parture from the churches what it may, this essay has 
distinctly justification on the ground of intellectual, 
philosophical, satisfaction. We do not wish to lose the 
ulterior reference of the universe to God, and yet the 
facts of experience, the detail of history, the trend of 
scientific thought are not at all reconcilable with the 
traditional utterance of revelation, as we know it, and 
quite noticeably forces us to a grave acknowledgment 
of defect, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction. 

Observe that in this case the stillness of the multi- 
tude under the provocations of doubt should carry 
no negotiable weight in an argument for more light, 
when we consider their limitless ignorance and their 
limitless patience, the absolute conceptual retardation 
of their intelligence to the bare facts of eating, sleeping, 
pleasure, and procreation. 



242 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

The endurable terms of existence are to be deter- 
mined by men and women, who think more and know 
more, for their thinking and knowing concerns itself 
after all with the necessitous limitations of the lives of 
these poor, and thoughtless believers. I mean that, 
given a direct renewed indisputable affirmation by 
God of his existence, his positive relations to this world 
as its mainstay and interpenetrating energy, as well as 
its father and friend, then there must follow revitaliza- 
tion of efforts to make it right and pure, and to empty 
it of its present absurdities and injustice. Nor is it less 
plain that if there is no answer, and we are driven to 
interpret this silence as a proof of God's absence, or of 
His indifference, or less despairingly of His immutable 
will to leave to ourselves the regulation of this world, 
that there will also follow changes, renovations, and a 
new life. 

There is a common prepossession among the Christian 
sects that uncertainty or the veiled vagueness of the 
present situation nourishes faith, with its attendant 
retinue of virtues and its mystical properties of 
strengthening the soul. Undoubtedly there is truth 
in this, but are the refined and delicate acquisitions of 
spiritual character to be estimated, when acquired by a 
few, as outweighing the value of the resumption of 
faith by many more, and the quickening of the faith 
that now perchance burns dimly in believing hearts, 
throughout the world? 

Besides if God is favorable to this appeal let no philis- 
tinian mind think the opp>ortunities for the exercise of 
faith have departed. If from behind the screen of things 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 243 

temporal and finite, the voice or hand or face of the 
Divine Creator emerges and vanishes again into that 
mysterious and ambient ether of thought, in which per- 
haps the whole world is bathed, and of which it is a 
momentary incarnation (See Gustave le Bon's Evolution 
of Matter) itself, there will remain insoluble trials on 
every hand, and the abyss of nature will still furnish 
boundless questions, science can still work unappeas- 
ingly at its problems, and Faith, that glittering emblem 
of the Christian, will still be unencumbered by too 
much light or any excess of certainty. 

But whether God announces Himself or He does not, 
the world by a sharp transference of intense attention 
will find itself confronting in either case a new resolve. 
If God speaks, then we may expect a startled and inten- 
sive continuation of the religious system, and probably 
as today the Protestant and the Catholic regime, both 
according to Sabatier expressing the dogma of authority 
in one emanating from an infallible Pope, in the other 
from an infallible Bible, and with them Sabatier's third 
regime, the religion of the spirit, wherein ''the moral 
conflict is appeased and the metaphysical chasm is 
filled by the revelation of the infinite love by which God 
unites Himself to man, becomes immanent in his weak 
being, and by that act raises him up and makes him live 
in God," and this last might grow inordinately to the 
suppression of all churches. If God does not speak, then 
again we should expect to see the disappearance of the 
technical or formalistic religious sentiment and prac- 
tice in some large measure, and the passage of the world 
of action, and of government, of thought and specula- 



244 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

tion, into schemes of scientific utility, and socialistic 
organization, probably also through scenes of much 
confusion, acrimonious argument, and destructive phy- 
sical conflict, with an ultimate result of the world rest- 
ing in some stage of economic precision, and the en- 
forced dispensation of an education dealing pertina- 
ciously with all the questions of health, adolescence, 
marriage, children, society, and self support and a slow 
surrender of the romantic phases of life, to the sover- 
eignty of intellectual prediction and rule. 

Is it not time that the world gained a new access of 
interest? Science industriously keeps us interested, 
and struggles to add its messages of novelty, working 
at some dimly conscious scheme of explaining all 
things, but science becomes tedious, and there is a 
furtive sense within us that it fails to meet our spectacu- 
lar needs, or irrigate the grounds of passion, poesy, 
imagination, and what might be called psychological 
unrest, with the refreshing and enriching waters of 
mystery and miracle. Time moves relentlessly for- 
ward, and we as transient flames pass and vanish like 
the spectres of Plato's cave. But are we only flames 
extinguished in the burning, or as we die out does our 
sharpened essence enter into new and brighter lights? 
Shall we be forced to a pure atheism, for Maine de 
Biran has said that a philosophy which ascribed to 
deity only infinite thought or supreme intelligence 
eliminating volition and love was pure atheism? Or 
shall we come into some accelerated phase of religious 
satisfaction and insight? Would not the Plan here 
sketched help us to one or the other? 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 245 

In closing we are tempted to try the patience of the 
reader by a last reflection. M. A. Sabatier in his very 
thoughtful and devout work — The Religions of Author- 
ity — has rejected both the Catholic and the Protestant 
churches, at least as far as their claims have been made 
by each an obligatory proof of their message to men. 
That is, he has described and named the Catholic church 
as a religion relying on the authority of the Pope, its 
bishops, its councils, and the historical doctrine of 
Apostolic Succession for its creed and formularies, and 
he has denounced it, because *4t has destroyed itself by 
its own excesses, and no longer appears to minds, having 
a degree of liberal culture, as anything but a spectre of 
the past." He has placed in contrast with it — though 
not preeminently to its advantage — the Protestant 
church, as depending upon the authority of the Bible 
and has summarized that effort in his stricture "that 
it could not succeed, because it was vitiated by a 
radical inconsistency; that the words of those who 
conducted it resembled the sand heaps which children 
make when they think to carry the top higher by piling 
on it the sand which they pull out from below." He 
has sharply criticised the claims of both as misleading 
and impotent. 

His point of view seems to us fallacious, but as we are 
here engaged in a practical search, and have no interest 
in polemics as such, and as we have already discovered 
large reasons for distrust in both church and revelation, 
as competent to afford certainty in the questions we are 
considering — viz., the existence of God, and the cer- 
tainty of a Future Life — we naturally turn to any new 



246 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

evidence which may help us, and we for a moment at 
least, eagerly inspect this Religion of the Spirit, which 
Sabatier offers as something superceding the rejected 
Catholic and Protestant positions, and in which per- 
chance our doubting hearts may attain confidence on 
these points. It would be quite absurd for us to lay 
before the reader the amplifications made by Sabatier 
of his religion of the spirit. It is unnecessary. We are 
after proofs. Does the religion of the spirit furnish 
them, for if it does our Plan is nullified at once. It cer- 
tainly does not; it falls immeasurably beneath the 
religions of authority in this respect, for it relies upon 
emotion, sentiment, a spiritual inward glow, and on 
excitation of feeling, proceeding from "the Christian 
consciousness, as constituted by the vital antithesis of 
two opposing sentiments; the sense of fatal separation 
from God, and the sense of blessed reconciliation with 
Him." 

It assumes what we desire to see proved, and there 
seems nothing for it, so far as reassuring utterances for 
us are concerned, but to return to an extraneous, an 
historic event for the evidence we seek, and of course 
with this reprisal we are exactly where we were before. 
Sabatier^s book is full of goodness, of epigrams and 
assertions, it is saturated with religious fervor and very 
charmingly utilizes a deep personal insight to give 
to all Christian feeling a philosophical beauty, but 
it is hopelessly inoperative as furnishing — except 
through feeling — a proof of God. And feeling — justi- 
fied doubtless in its energumens — must come increas- 
ingly under the suspicion of insufficiency, for it 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 247 

is demonstrably transitory, and circumstantial, and 
would never be permitted in the court room, or in 
the laboratory to prove innocency or guilt, or to 
regulate our views as to the nature of any physical 
phenomena. 



CHAPTER X 
Conclusion 

The attitude and temperament of this book is one of 
caustic reaHsm. It may indeed seem a harsh reflection 
of the spirit of St. Thomas. But this cannot be con- 
strued as an impeachment. It is difficult to see why 
St. Thomas is not to be approved, nor in the story as it 
stands in the Testament, was disapproval censoriously 
allotted to him. 

His frame of mind was considered legitimate, even if 
less lofty than his companions, and he was satisfied 
with proofs. And are not proofs essential? Lilly has 
written in his Enigma, "true it is that although this 
religion (Christianity) has been in the world for well 
nigh two thousand years, it has not as yet, in all its 
various forms received the allegiance of a majority of 
the human race," and only yesterday the late Pope — 
in an utterance which will not probably have the slight- 
est weight, but which is significant as proceeding from 
the high point of observation commanded by one whose 
sole occupation is the registration of the religious ten- 
dencies of the time — has said that the modernists 
'Tmally set aside as insufficient the proof of God's 
existence from the constitution of the universe, and the 
proof of revelations from miracles." 

I cannot see how any one can regard carelessly our 
necessitudinous position, the flat hopelessness of ad- 



THE WORLD'S PRAYER 249 

ministering faith to men in God, when they prevailingly 
deny His being, or regard it dubiously by reason of the 
cold predominance of a scientific regimen in the world, 
which seems to rule with a heartless precision irrespec- 
tive of merit or suffering or injustice and a vast turmoil 
of ethnic tides and political ambitions which has 
continuously, throughout history, convulsed the world 
with chaos and misery, in which no sudden hand 
alighted to smite the wicked or help the helpless. 

So far as we can see God comes into the world through 
men who live precariously for ideals they can inter- 
mittently understand, and seldom realize. But reflec- 
tions of this sort drag us away from the essential nucleus 
of our plea. Let misery remain, and wickedness, and 
let the struggle go on, the light and the shade, the baffl- 
ing troubles and the weltering misdirection and fer- 
ment, and postulant agonies of despair and imprecation. 
Let that all be. We are in the world, part of it, as it is. 
If straightened it is to be, somehow and sometime it 
will be, I imagine, but is God there also; is He there? 
or Not? Does science answer this query? No. As 
R. A. Proctor said, ''and science answers these ques- 
tions as they were answered of old 'As touching the 
Almighty we cannot find Him out'." Does experience 
answer it? Perhaps. In many ways we improve, and 
dim lights of understanding that the world is meant for 
all, and not for a few, play glimmeringly around us to- 
day, shining most brilliantly in these United States of 
America; but is this improvement from God?; it so 
often comes from those to whom He is professedly a 
myth. Cannot we compel some new accent from the 



250 THE WORLD'S PRAYER 

embracing mystery about us? Let the mystery remain. 
It must remain anyhow, for it has well been said, to 
explain our being is to abolish it, but what we want is 
the satisfaction of the cry for companionship, and we 
ask for it in a day which remains perforce, as far as its 
mental apprehension goes, in the austere judicial 
position of requiring proofs for its faith. 

We have rehearsed the reasons which should make 
the Plan described feasible. There is an accepted 
revelation proclaiming God, and the constitution and 
the beauty of the world, or the universe, force us to logi- 
cally conclude that its author would intellectually 
sympathize with our request, while compassion issuing 
from a source of love would impart the impetus of 
desire to do so. The revelations, the churches, our 
spirits — today the sole witnesses to God — move in 
regions of persuasion exorbitantly feeble for the pur- 
poses of conviction in this matter, and through the 
avenues of prayer by which all our needs should receive 
consideration we ask, or may ask, for a sign. If God 
answers, the world emerges into a welcome light of re- 
assurance, and if there is no answer, then, seizing, as it 
were, the reins of things ourselves let society resolve 
itself into new units of action, in conformity with the 
demands of a utilitarian Utopia, ''w^hen," as a writer in 
the Edinburgh Review writes, ''the whole of the antag- 
onistic forces of nature have been quelled, and Man is 
entire master of his own fate and maker of his own 
environment." 



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